A Few Days in the Netherlands

Following our fun weekend in the Harz Mountains, we headed west to the Netherlands. Our first stop was the Hoge Veluwe National Park. The park is one of the largest in the Netherlands, but for us the title is quite humorous as it is only 21 square miles in area. To put that in context, Yosemite is 1,200 square miles. However, Yosemite cannot boast that it has a world class art museum in the middle, nor does it provide a free bicycle to every visitor. Hoge Veluwe, on the other hand, can and does. We paid the park / museum entrance fee, picked out our “White Bikes” and headed into the park. The terrain was like the interior of Cape Cod: sandy with scrubby pine trees and low shrubs. There was some contour to the land as well. The area is famous for having naturally occurring sand dunes. These mini deserts pop up from time to time like giant children’s sandboxes. Eventually we coasted up to the museum bike parking area, parked “our” bikes and walked into the museum through a modern sculpture exhibit. The Kröller-Müller Museum was founded in 1935 when the wealthy art collector, Helene Kröller-Müller, donated her art collection to the Dutch government under the agreement that it would build a museum on her property to house it. It was beautiful both inside and out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kr%C3%B6ller-M%C3%BCller_Museum
We spent the next couple of days kicking around Amsterdam. It was an especially fun visit because we met Gramma and Gampa there, and spent lots of time with Hank's family. The pinnacle was Uncle Jan's 90th birthday party and art show. Very inspirational!