Day trip to Heusden and Den Bosch. Part I

I survived to last weekend's party in Bilbao and I am back to continue talking about the Easter holidays, a bit late but as we say in Spanish, better late than never. On Easter Sunday we were thinking on going to Amsterdam but we thought it better and we decided to go to the south. Raffaella Carrá taught us that to make love properly you must go to the South, so there we went, to Noord Brabant, that even if is the North Brabant (there is a South Brabant in Belgium) it is in the South of The Netherlands.

Church bells in Heusden

Day trip to Giethoorn and Kampen

Last Saturday we were going to 's-Hertogenbosch -everybody calls it Den Bosch , why to put such a strange name to a city? Anyway, I am basque, I should be used to strange names-, the point is that we were going to spend the day in Den Bosch but they were working on the railway so there were no trains and I really didn't feel like going by bus so we decided to go to other place with the car.

A canal in Giethoorn

A friend suggested to go to Giethoorn, a village some kilometers north to Zwolle, the capital of the province of Overijsel, and after checking the guide we saw that was pointed out as one of the most beautiful villages in The Netherlands, and nearby there was another city that looked pretty cool so there we went.

Day trip to Het Gooi: Laren, Naarden and Muiden

Last Sunday we woke up early so we decided to play the tourist. There are a lot of nice places for a day trip in The Netherlands, the country is not so big so if you are more or less in the center of it, almost everything is close enough for an excursion. 

We decided to go to a little area called Het Gooi in the province of North Holland. In this area there are some very beautiful medieval villages. We visited three of them, Laren, Naarden and Muiden (I have just read that Muiden is not in Het Gooi but in another region called Vechtstreek, but anyway).

Our first stop was Laren, a small very rich village just some kilometers north of Hilversum. This town is full of small farms reconverted in houses, expensive shops and small mansions. The center of the town is nice for a walk, there are a couple of churches and a park. You can see that people that live there are no beggars, the wealthiness  is all over the place, it can be seen in the quality of the houses, in the cars and in the shops. Here there are some pictures:

Kinderdijk

The other day I went with a couple of friends to Kinderdijk. Kinderdijk is a small village near by Rotterdam, it is settled next to the Rhine river (at that spot is called Lek, actually the situation of the Rhine in The Netherlands is pretty complex, with lots of branches and names, you can read more about it in Wikipedia). The village is included in the area called "De Groene Hart", The Green Heart in English, that is the big area between Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht, it is mainly farms and fields, except some villages and the city of Gouda.

This area is full of paths to walk or ride the bike, as we went by car to Kinderdijk we walked a bit in the surrounding area. Just next to the parking lot there is a path that goes in between two canals and it's full of wind mills, one of the national symbols of the country. Nevertheless the wind mills have played a huge role in Dutch history as they were used to pump out water to avoid floodings in the constant war against water. I didn't know about this before coming to the country and I thought that they were just for grind seeds or things like that but a Dutch friend told me that and... actually makes a lot of sense, who is gonna crowd the country with wind mills just to grid seeds? Of course some of the mills are also for that, in Zaanse Schan (kind of a park with wind mills and little houses, probably I will talk about it in the future)  you can enter the wind mills and see how they were used to produce mustard or as sawmills.

So, there we went to walk a bit, make some pictures and expend a couple of hours just enjoying the lovely Dutch fall, with black -very black- clouds above us that threatened rain and wind that could move you to the canal in a second, just to oppose the blog's name :)