Saturday
Our second-to last excursion
Location: Drenthe and Germany, making this our first and only international excursion
I must first say that this excursion to Drenthe meant that I have now been to all 12 Dutch provinces! Woohoo! To show my newly acquired geographical prowess, I will list them all now in the order I visited them:
Noord-Holland
Zuid-Holland
Friesland
Groningen
Flevoland
Utrecht
Gelderland
OverIJssel
Noord-Brabant
Limburg
Zeeland
Drenthe
Some of them (Friesland, Noord-Brabant) have only been seen from a moving van/train. But I plan to fix that in my free time after classes are over. Perhaps I will make a pilgrimage to Friesland, home of my ancestors, and I also very much want to go to Noord-Brabant and visit Efteling! (Theme park. Oh yes).
Anyway, on Saturday we went to Drenthe to learn about peat colonies. Summary: the peat colonies harvested peat like it was nobody's business. Peat was the fuel source back in the day, and the peat colonies made it happen. End of summary.
Our first stop was at a nature preserve-type area where we took a walk through the peat lanscape. The day was not very sunny, but at least it wasn't raining. The walk was quite pleasant. A few picture highlights:
Prof. Aay explains it all
We venture into the unknown
Prof. Zylstra (who is leading this semester next year and came to Amsterdam this week) explains sphagnum moss
Traipsing around
After the walk, it was time to drive around and look at linear villages and such. This included our (drumroll)...excursion into Germany. I will now utilize photos to convey the tale of our journey into another land.
As you can see, our route is about to take us off the edge of the map
Germany is at the end of the trees...
The little blue sign on the right says "Welcome to Germany" (in German, of course). Almost there...
In Germany
Oh, yeah
(Bad picture)
In Germany, wind turbines have orange stripes
German signs
We almost drove onto some train tracks in Germany. Whoops.
And that is about the extent of our time in Germany. Some people jumped out of the vans when we pulled over at an industrial area, just to say their feet touched German soil, but their stay on the ground lasted for only a few seconds. We were, after all, in Germany to learn about peat. Extended stays in Duitsland are for another time (like Berlin in two days!!!).
After making it back to the good ol' Netherlands, we stopped in Ter Appel for a bit. Wandering around Ter Appel proved that there is not much to see there (besides a cool old monastery), however the girls (myself included) managed to find this gem:
The full name was the Any Tyme Snack & Dine Three Musketeers Cafe/Restaurant. What a mouthful. We stopped there for sustenance, and I had koffie and appelgebak. Very appropriate in the town of Ter Appel!
Then it was back in the vans for a tour of more linear villages and an eventual stop at the Colonial Peat Museum:
Some highlights of the peat museum:
These creepy coats. The museum is in an old school, so the flying coats were supposed to represent former students. But they just look like ghosts!
This "charming" story our guide told us. Really, she started off the story by saying in was "charming".
The story is, a man from Veendam (city where the museum is) and his wife were at sea when the wife died. The man wanted to bury her in Veendam, so he put the wife into a barrel filled with alcohol and took her all the way back. And rumor has it that the sailors drank the alcohol out of the barrel. And when they got back to Veendam, they buried the entire barrel in the ground.
Not such a charming story, if you ask me.
Last highlight: the potato room! The giant potato displays taught us about making potato flour. We watched potato movies on the potatoe TV while sitting in the potato chair. Potato, potato, potato.
Then with the help of chocolate lollipops, we climbed back into the vans and made the 2.5 hour trip back to Amsterdam. End of Saturday's excursion!
Sunday
Our last excursion
Dune walk to the North Sea
Before we got to the dunes on Sunday, we took a small detour around the bulb fields:
We were a little late. Most of the fields had been cut down already, but we still got to see splotches of color here and there. It added some excitement on the trip to our ultimate goal, a combo nature park/water treatment facility that we would walk through to get to the dunes.
We saw some of the water treatment in action:
And began to once again traipse through a landscape. To amuse ourselves we sang songs along the way, picked inchworms off of each other's jackets (they were everywhere!), and contemplated the meaning of life. Well, maybe not the last one. After about two hours, we made it to the dunes and the sea!
We enjoyed some time at the dunes and then began the trip back to the entrance for the real excitement of the day -- Pannekoeken Restaurant! Since it was our last excursion, we were all going to stop and have dinner at the restaurant in the park. And what better food to have than a delicious Dutch pannekoek? The trip back took only about an hour, and we were rewarded at the end with these tasty treats:
A great way to end our STNL excursions. It's hard to believe we are finished with all ten of them...we have come so far since the Afsluitdijk and the terpen! And now that the excursions and this short week are over, we only have one more week of class before exams begin. Ahh!!! I don't want to think about it!!!
Guess I will just have to escape to Berlin for the weekend :)
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