We camped for two nights at the Lake Resort in Beekse Bergen Safari Park. Whilst we didn’t have tickets to enter the main safari park you could see lots of animals from the guest resort area.
Guests are also invited to see the lions being fed. This only happens three times a week to simulate a more natural environment for the lions. We were fortunate to be there for one of these sessions.
We also saw camels, giraffes, rhinos, zebras and some different types of deer.
Also included with our campsite stay was free entry to Speelland which is an adventure playground. I made friends with a boy called Louie and we had lots of fun together playing in the sand pits, playgrounds and going on the giant flamingo pedal boats.
We explored the city of Utrecht on our bikes. There is a big disused tramway which has now been converted into a cycle path that leads straight into the centre of the city.
It is a very big city with lots of new modern buildings. There are also lots of canals and beautiful old streets lined with cafes and shops.
We went into the big shopping mall and I enjoyed looking in the Lego shop and also in the Lush shop. They make lots of pretty bars of soaps and bubble bath products. The shop assistant invited me to have a play with some of the products, some fizz and some froth up when mixed with water.
Museum Speelklok is a music museum that specialises in instruments that can play themselves once we have provided the energy or power to run them. There were lots of hands on things to try.
I enjoyed a game where you could select a scene from a famous movie to play on the screen, and then you match the appropriate music to it. The movies and famous tunes included:
Jaws
Charlie Chaplin
Lala Land
a Western film
It was funny to put the wrong music to the wrong film.
There was another exhibit which uses metal arms to hit many different household objects to play a tune. The objects included lamps, saucepans, pencils, crocery, mirrors, skateboards and many more.
Whilst we were abroad I noticed that the cars had different letters on their number plates.
Some were different colours too. Mummy explained that cars from the United Kingdom have UK either at the start of the number plate or as a sticker on the back of the car.
Other countries have different letters:
F = France
B = Belgium
NL = the Netherlands
D = Germany, the German word for Germany is Deutschland and that’s why it’s a D.
Giethoorn is a small village in the Overijssel region, which is famous for having no cars. This is not strictly true though, as only a very small section of the village is truly car free with canals instead of roads.
It is known as the Venice of the North, although it seems lots of towns make this claim.
It is a very pretty place and we took a one hour canal boat trip. Giethoorn came about due to the peat trade. Most of the traditional houses are built on islands and connected to the main street by a private bridge. There are 176 bridges!
On Monday we visited Dinoland. I am massively into dinosaurs at the moment so this was the best day of the holiday for me.
We walked around the park and looked at all the dinosaur models. Mummy read out the facts as we went around.
There is a big education centre where I painted my very own ceramic dinosaur and could use modelling clay to make my own dinosaur.
There was a hut where you could excavate for fossils.
We watched the dinosaur shows and I got to meet some of the dinosaurs afterwards.
We also got to sit in a real water airplane from the old days and the staff member explained what all the controls did. It was even possible to move the tail flap up and down.
There was also a big play area with a gigantic dome that was really hard to climb up. I did manage it eventually and enjoyed sliding down the enormous slide.
There was rock climbing, crazy golf and a laser tag game which I really enjoyed.
We visited my mums cousin who gave us a tour of Leeuwarden, the city he calls home. Leeuwarden is at the north of the Netherlands in the Friesland region, it is the home of the Friesland cows (the black and white cows).
We saw the Love Heads sculpture surrounded by mist.
"‘Love’ consists of two 7-metre high, white sculptures of a boy and a girl. They appear to look at each other, but their eyes are closed. The facial expression of the children is serene. Around them hangs a 2-metre-high cloud of mist we can wander around in. ‘They are dreaming’, says Plensa; ‘for children, the future is a dream full of promise.’ The Spanish artist got his inspiration for the fountain of mist when he saw the mist above the Frisian fields early in the morning. ‘In Friesland’, he says, ‘the water comes out of the ground.’"
We tried to see the tower that leans more than The Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it was surrounded by scaffolding. We walked through Passage de la Baleine (Whale Passage) which uses the ribs of a whale skeleton to form arches that you walk under.
We also went inside Great or Jacobin Church which had been transformed into a giant second hand clothes shop.
We saw the big picture of Maria Louise. She shows how many of the European Royal amilies can be related directly back to her, including our very own Royal Family.
Natuurmuseum Fryslân (Nature Museum of Friesland):
Whilst exploring Leeuwarden we visited the Nature Museum.
I flew like a goose in a sort of hang glider. I had to fly under pylons and avoid being attacked by birds of prey before finding somewhere safe to land.
I learnt there are more species of beetle than any other animal in the world.
We saw skeletons of lots of animals including an elephant and whale
I saw lots of different types of sea shells
There were fossils, taxidermy animals and dried animals.
I played a giant Operation game on a crocodile
I had to match up different poo with the right animals, with mummy’s help I got them all right
They had replica poos to show the different sizes from elephants to foxes
We visited the Simonehoeve Cheese & Clog Factory just outside Volendam.
We were shown how they make the local cheeses of Edam & Gouda are made. Edam is always red and Gouda is always yellow. They are named after the two nearby towns. We were allowed to sample lots of different cheeses, I like the smoked one best. They also had pesto flavour and chilli flavour. The dutch like to spread mustard on their cheese…yuck.
After this were had a demonstration on making clogs. They are a very old traditional dutch shoe. They came about because not everyone could afford leather whereas wood was available to all. First a log is roughly sculpted into shape by hand using a chisel. Next the hole is scooped out for your foot. These days the factory uses machines and can produce 200 pairs a day.
They showed us several types of clogs including ice skates, fishermans clogs (which have spikes to keeping safe on the slippery decks, they are similar to modern day football boots). My favourite was the Smugglers Clog, the sole is cleverly shaped to make the footprint appear as if you were walking in the opposite direction….very sneaky!
I also watched a lady do some engraving by using a very hot metal pen like tool which burns letters or patterns into the wood.
This is a collection of 12 working windmills. It was a really hot day and I had lots of fun jumping over the shadows of the windmill sails as they raced across the ground.
It was super busy so we only went into one windmill called het jonge schaap which means the young sheep. It was a working wood mill.
We watched a short video about who the mill was built and then saw it in action.
It was extremely loud and there was a very strong smell of fresh wood. Big tree trunks are placed on the floor inside the mill and a line of saws are pulled up and down by a set of gears that are turned by the wind in the sails.
We watched the power of huge tree trunks being sliced into neat wind planks by the power of the wind.
The Corpus Museum Experience is a journey through the human body. The guided tour included some 4D films where you had to wear special glasses. The outside of the building features a giant human which you actually travel through, learning all about the organs, the blood vessels, how we are made and just about everything else to do with the human body.
We raced with the sperm down the fallopian tubes to fertilise and egg and watched a new person be made.
We stood inside a huge mouth, with giant teeth and a spongy tongue.
There were lots of optical illusions to look at and some interactive games.
I learnt about how our ears and eyes work and what all the different organs do.
Keukenhof Gardens are world famous for their astonishing colours. The gardens are only open for 12 weeks of the year during the tulip season. The gardens has all sorts of different spring bulbs. We visited late in the season and saw:
tulips
daffodils
hyacinths
alliums
muscari
In the Netherlands over 4 billion tulips are exported every year making it the largest grower in the world.
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