W10 of Y2

We found a great new restaurant this week. The atmosphere was so interesting and the food was great!

It wasn't exactly a McDonald's playland... but Whitney liked it! (notice the tobacco hanging from the ceiling, next to the huge accordion, next to the garlic and dried corn... so random!)

The waitress brought us a bowl of water for Kayla right away.

Whitney loved using a "princess glass"

The weather was beautiful all week (70's-80's). One night after dinner we walked, Whitney rode her scooter (in her beautiful "dresser" that she still loves!!!), down to the corner Italian ice cream shop.
The kids love the Spaghetti Eis. They squeeze the ice cream out of a tool that makes it look like spaghetti noodles, then pour strawberry sauce over it for the spaghetti sauce, and top it off with coconut to look like Parmesan cheese. It really is sooo good!! :)

Afterwords we walked down to the flower garden and picked some more tulips.
Such a perfect evening!

The next morning we hit the road to go to Belgium and Amsterdam. Our main purpose for this trip was to see the world-famous Keukenhof Gardens. The gardens are only open for 2 months out of the year. We missed them last year and have been planning this trip ever since. This is also the main reason why Johnny came to see us when he did, so that he could go to these gardens too.

But first.... Belgium (on the way).


The drive there wasn't too long... around 5-6 hours. We stopped for gas station food on the way. By the way... European gas stations have great food!

Belgian waffles... in Belgium! lol!

The first thing we did was park and take a bus into downtown.
FINALLY!!! It's beautiful!

Brugge was a great surprise to me! This really did turn out to be the highlight of our weekend. This is a beautiful city. The architecture was so unique and the canals everywhere made it so picturesque! I just wanted to keep taking pictures. The streets were busy and there was so much to see!

Did I mention there was so much to see? My friend, who lives in Belgium, said to take a boat ride on the canals as soon as you get there. We were making our way to the boats but had so many distractions....

Aiden is really into Porsche's lately. What luck! There was some kind of a Porsche car show going on! (He's holding his favorite BMW in his hand.)

We found some girls singing... who know's what.

Some more girls dancing

Horses and bikes everywhere! I liked how people rode doubles on bikes here.

Shopping!!! Chocolate and Lace!

Oh yeah... the boats.

I could post a million pics here of our boat ride. It was so beautiful!

After the boat ride we toured some more on foot


We found a nice little Brasserie and stopped for dinner.

The kids all wanted hamburgers and fries... but were a little disappointed at what they got. (Aiden's face says it all!)

The restaurants in Belgium and Amsterdam had eggs on all the menu's any time of day. I love eggs! I had an omelet.

We made up for the hamburgers by getting more waffles! There were NO complaints here!


After dinner it was time to say goodbye to Brugge. The quick little side trip.
Can't wait to go back!

Our hotel in Amsterdam


We woke up the next morning to freezing cold, rainy, windy weather. We had planned to do the gardens on the first day but decided to do our indoor plans instead... hoping that the weather would be better on the second day.

First we went to Clara Maria's. They make wooden shoes and cheese here.

Next to Brugge, the shoe maker at Clara Maria's was the second highlight of the trip. So sweet with the boys and pretty cute too!

These machines have been making wooden shoes for 100-110 years! There are actually a lot of health benefits to wearing wooden shoes that I never knew.

The boys got to keep their shoe that they helped make.

Next, we got a lesson on how cheese was made

And then we got to eat LOTS of cheese!

Picking out our favorites to bring home.

The kids liked petting and feeding the cows that made the milk that make the cheese! lol!

My little Dutch farm girl!

The weather was still yucky. More people riding doubles on bikes. It looked so fun!

We tried going to the Anne Frank house and the Van Gogh museums but, of course, the lines were miles long since it was already in the middle of the day.

Rembrandt's house didn't open until later though so we were able to get right in here.

The highlight of Rembrandt's house was that Whitney pooped in the potty here! YAY!!


Across the street we found a great restaurant for lunch.

Jeremy and I had fish and chips. Yummy!

Whitney had a croquette which was very interesting. It tasted like breaded gravy. The kids didn't like it but it wasn't bad - I just couldn't believe this was 1 of the 2 options available on the kids menu! The boys were happy with eggs this time!
After lunch we walked all over downtown... mainly because we had to park so far away. We were so cold! I didn't pack warm enough clothes since it had been in the 80's the week before. I could have sworn I even saw snow a couple of times. The wind blew the cover of my umbrella right off and we had to throw it away in a garbage full of other umbrella's.
Connor and Johnny checking out the bongs!

After all that walking in the cold, wind, and rain... We were happy just to make it back to our hotel room and go swimming

We ordered pay per view that night (up) and had New York pizza delivered to our room. How American is that?! It was so nice to just relax though after a very stressful, tiring, COLD day!

We started day 2 off with high hopes of going to the gardens but as soon as we looked outside we realized it was even colder and windier than the day before. We were still hoping to go in the afternoon.
We started the day off at a Pancake House for some interesting pancakes.

We were all jealous of Aiden's! His looked the best. Also, it was hilarious watching the kids take bites with a whole bunch of syrup on them! It was molasses! lol!

Then we waited in line forever to get into the Anne Frank house. Apparently we were there on the 50 year anniversary.

I got in trouble after taking this picture and couldn't take anymore pictures inside the house.

I was surprised at how many original things were still in the house, like the pictures that Anne had put on the walls to make it look nicer. We walked up the stairs behind the bookshelves that hid the secret door where 8 people lived. It was such a weird feeling. Even the kids were feeling it. We explained a little about the history before going inside. After we were inside the boys kept asking if people in the pictures were dead. We had to tell them to stop asking that. Then Whitney, our little parrot, started skipping around the house singing "dead, dead, dead, dead....." Uggh! There were no other kids there and I got a few dirty looks. I'm glad I took them though. They asked some really good questions afterwords in the car and Connor's teacher asked him to tell the class the next day at school. We bought the diary while we were there are starting to read it with them now.

We realized we weren't going to see the gardens on this trip. We stopped along the road on the way home to take some pictures of some tulip farms. It's not the same but the fields were so pretty with every color of tulip for miles long.

It ended up taking us 7 hours to get home because there was a lot of traffic! It's good that we left early for this reason. We ended up getting home after 11:00 and had school/work the next morning.

The trip was a little disappointing but still a great experience. We could have been better prepared but maybe we saw some things we wouldn't have seen otherwise.
The gardens will be there next year.