suze2000 | Keukenhof and Germany

The next day, Darren bravely went off and picked up the car, while I gathered the bags and checked out of the hotel. As with previous days it was COLD and quite overcast. And when we got out of Amsterdam, to Keukenhof, it turned out to be windy as well. We were put in mind of Van Gogh’s Two Peasant Women in a Peat Field, which we’d seen the other day.

How miserable they must have been on the open, windswept, soggy fields in Holland, scratching out enough food to survive (of course, they may have been gloriously happy, but we’ll never know. All I know is, it doesn’t look happy).

Anyway, we rugged up and headed in. Once inside, we were swept up into a riot of colour.

Come on, what big kid can resist a pair of clogs?

And even Darren enjoyed it more than he’d imagined he would.

I could fill the page up with tulips, but it suffices to say that a lovely morning was had by all and, feeling refreshed, we headed off towards Utrecht and the Nederlands ‘sRijks Munt (the National Mint) and the Geld Museum, that Darren was keen to see because of his interest in coins.

Let me tell you, we never expected such special treatment. We showed up and the lady at the door apologised that nothing was in English (because of the Euro-zone induced budget cuts they had no money to translate anything), so instead she would get us an English-speaking guide to show us around! We got our own private tour, and Harold (our guide) was lovely.

Afterward spending much longer than we expected there, we set Kylie (our GPS, so named because she has a strong Australian accent) towards Germany and headed off to the Autobahns.

Let me tell you: those Germans are MAD on those roads. We’d be humming along in our lovely Golf at 145 or so, and we’d get overtaken by someone who’d have to be doing 180 or more. It was seriously disturbing. And all these mad speeders were driving large family wagons (estates, I think they are referred to in Britain), so presumably a fair number of them had their kids in the car (maybe they were trying to get away from them by driving so fast!).

And the other thing we noticed: as soon as we crossed the border, the Dutch cars disappeared and we were surrounded by German licence plates. How does that happen? NOBODY crosses the border? Anyway, after a search for a late lunch, we reached our super-cute German hotel in the district town of Celle.

Celle’s town centre is heritage listed, and so it should be, with streets like this:

We were visiting Celle because Darren’s great-uncle Ray was shot down over Germany and very few members of his family have been able to make the journey to see his final resting place, the Becklingen War Cemetery, and his brother, Uncle Ken is not getting any younger. But the town itself was lovely, and most of the people were helpful and pleasant (even the poor German lady in the village of Becklingen that I bailed up for directions because we couldn’t find the war cemetery – it was a little awkward asking an older German for directions to an Allied cemetery, too.).

After paying our respects, Darren also visited at Bergen-Belsen which was also nearby. I chose not to visit Bergen-Belsen, as my memories of Dachau are still fresh, even 20 years after I went there.

Later that evening, we had dinner at Marta’s, which was lovely. Again, we were looking for local food, which was quite hard to find. The hotel recommended a Mexican, an Argentinian steakhouse, and something else before we specified we were looking to eat German food. At that time of year, there seems to be a lot of asparagus about, it was in at least half the dishes! We did have a great meal though, Darren sampled the local beer and I had delicious cider with my meal.