Dad's visit - the relatives continue

On Sunday we headed out to the other side of the family, in a little town outside of Haaksbergen. Dad decided he knew where it was, so we drove for 20 minutes before we realised we were going in the wrong direction and had totally missed our turnoff.... but never mind.

So we arrive at Gerard and Annie's house and there is already a piece of cake sitting in front of each of our seats. It was coconut and it was goooooooooooood......

But I digress.

Here's Annie and I

And here's Franz, Gerard and Dad

Gerard is Caroline's dad's brother, and neither he nor Annie speak English. Well, not much. I think at the end of the day Gerard did say to us 'Thank you very much'. They were very worried about the english-speaking visitors arriving and so had convinced 4 other relatives to come along so that we could have translators!


Here's Dad with Josie

And me with Ine and Nardy (Ine is the wife of Franz, in the photo above)

We had such a great lunch (and afternoon) and then some of the honorary translators took us to Jeroen's farm (he is possibly the son of one of Caroline's cousins... at this stage I'm getting really hazy on all the connections...). We saw a little calf that had been born at 10.30 that morning! It was still all covered in goo, sitting in a little stable in the dell. Very cute, and very interesting. We went into the barn where all the cows are living for winter. They were mostly very curious about us and were sticking their heads out into the middle area. I reached out to touch the head of one of them, and it stuck its tongue out and tried to lick me! So I got scared and pulled away. And then after that, none of them would let me near their heads. I wanted to pat a head, but oh well. (Such a city girl here!) Then, Ine was scaring the cows (accidentally) with her umbrella. It was certainly a strange sight - 50 huge cows all jumping in unison.

After that we went back to Gerrit and Josie's house for coffee, cheese some leftover easter eggs and more biscuits. We didn't even need dinner that night because we had so much snack food and coffee! Franz and Ine live next door so Franz brought over his computer and showed us lots of the family photos that he has been collecting (including wedding photos of relatives basically as far back as cameras were in existence - very impressive).

This is the only group shot we got from Gerrit and Josie's house - unfortunately that's me looking like a zombie in the middle.

We were there until about 11pm, and Gerard and Annie had come with us so they were out very late too!

Here's my favourite photo of the day - Annie hamming up to the camera with her dish brush and the rest of us cracking up. So much fun!

Dad's visit

I went to Schiphol twice on Friday - in the morning to drop off Scott and in the evening to pick up Dad!

We drove straight from the airport to Haaksbergen, a small town close to the German border. Caroline's family live here, so we went to visit them.

We arrived at the hotel to find no one to check us in - the staff were really spacey and weird! And of course dinner was over (even though it wasn't even 9pm yet, on a Friday).

We headed out to Buffalo Bill's, an american steakhouse for dinner. And Dad had just come from America, so it was a bit weird. Dinner was good though, and we had dessert too (also good). The menu was all in Dutch though (strange for an american steakhouse, eh?) and Dad was pretty impressed to hear my vague translation of the Dutch into English... although food words were pretty much my top priority once I got here!

On Saturday morning we went for a little trip around the area and Dad showed me the house that he and Caroline stayed in when they were here for about a month two years ago. Then he showed me this cool Water Mill which was nearby.

Complete with the original grain-squashing wheel from the 1500s:

Then we went into town and had a look around at the Church:

Including the bullet holes in the side of it from World War II:


Before having lunch at a little pub in the square. Then we went shopping a little, and back to the hotel. Being a small town, in this time we had three messages at the hotel from relatives wondering where we were. They knew we were in town of course, but someone had also spotted us eating lunch and had passed it around. Even people on Sunday asked us how our lunch was on Saturday and knew where we'd been!

In the afternoon we went to catch up with some Dutch relatives, Benny and Thea and their son Rudi. Of course a million other rellies showed up when they heard we were there!

We went for dinner at Miranda's house (she's in the red top).

Miranda and her husband Herbert have two daughters, Romy (7) and Manon (4). Romy is super keen to learn English, and showed us how she could count to ten and a couple of other things. She won't start learning English at school for a couple of years but she wants to know now! After dinner she dragged out her Dutch alphabet book and taught me some Dutch words!

Who else knew that Miffy (that rabbit) is Dutch? Her Dutch name is Nijntje (which means little bunny). There are stores all over here selling just Miffy stuff (well Nijntje) and the Delft ceramics even do a Nijntje line!