Day 6

Kasey- So, I travel a certain way. I really don't want to miss anything, so some days I really pack stuff into the plans. I also like to go to cities just to say I've been there and like to drive off the highway if it means you can get a better feel and appreciation of the place. I still like to relax, though, and I'm usually fine with scrapping some things from the plans. There were a few days in our plans that I knew would be really busy and physically exhausting...this was one of those days. We woke up really early (5:50am) and left from Burgum. We got a tad lost around Leeuwarden trying to find the highway (I didn't have a car most of my mission so that's my excuse as to why we got lost a few times). We really enjoyed driving through the countryside because of how green it was and how pretty it was to see big churches, windmills, canals, flowers, etc.

 We drove to Harlingen which is a city on the sea. We taught some people there in the refugee camp. We drove by there but it's not there anymore. We parked and went up the dike where you can see the water higher up than the land. It's so crazy to stand there and see the ocean on one side of you, and then on the other side a vastly lower land area -- and only a small area that is separating the two!

 

We drove across the Afsluitdijk over to North Holland. After taking a nap a little bit into North Holland we drove up to Den Helder just to see the city (it's at the very top of North Holland). We drove the highway down to Alkmaar and really loved the drive because of all the tulip fields we passed and all the windmills. There are SO many windmills, and big fields of flowers covering the land! We mainly saw yellow and pink. Most of the other flowers hadn't bloomed, yet. 

We then went to Volendam which is closer to Amsterdam and bought some cool matching  Holland jackets. It's funny because we bought the Holland jackets the same place I bought my Amsterdam jacket 6 years ago. We enjoyed the sea walk and going into some shops (it's a pretty touristy place but it's a nice, quaint little town). (Emily: I LOVED Volendam! I know it's a totally touristy place, but everything was so adorable -- the little stores, tulips, little windmills, right next to the water!)

So after Volendam we drove to Haarlem and parked near the station. We walked to the Corrie Ten Boom house and did a tour in Dutch. Emmy just finished the Hiding Place (a very inspiring book) so it was cool for her to see it.

After Haarlem we took the train over to Amsterdam. I never served in A'dam but I like going there because it's older and I think it's pretty with all the canals, it's kind of like Venice.

 
Some of our plans got changed around in A'dam, but we went to a few outdoor markets and Emmy got to try her first stroop waffel (which was delicious!). We ate at a Surinaams restaurant with a Groupon. That was pretty good. We walked around the city and saw the Rijksmuseum, the Dam square, the Anne Frank House, and stopped to see some sights that Ocean's 12 was filmed at, namely the coffee shop and the hotel.

 Our camera wasn't working the second half of the day so we didn't get a ton of pictures. So in Europe the bathrooms aren't free to use. I've never liked that because really they aren't that much cleaner that public bathrooms in the U.S. I can still say that I've never had to pay to use the bathroom. I know it's not that cool, but I went 17 hours on this day without using the bathroom. I could have gone longer but I wanted to go to bed. After Amsterdam, we went back to Haarlem, back to our car and drove down to Den Haag. Gosh I love Den Haag. When I was in Holland, everyone wanted to serve there...I was ecstatic when I heard I was transferred there. It had been a really tiring day thusfar when we got in. We heard about this site- airbnb.com that was a bed and breakfast from normal people who volunteer a room in their house for a good price. We communicated with the people we were staying with a few weeks before our trip and they said we could park at their church. So we parked our car there and left it there for 2 days. It took us about an hour to walk to their place. It was a pretty chilly day so by the end of the day we were both cold and tired...it was so good to sleep in a nice bed! Before we went to sleep we visited with Hans and Karen, the couple we stayed with. They were really cool and had a really nice apartment right in the Centrum of the city. They spoke English very well and they honestly bent over backwards to make sure that we were comfortable and they were just the nicest people. We really enjoyed visiting with them. We finally crashed on the most comfortable bed ever around 11:30. (This picture is the day we left this bed and breakfast so that is why the bed isn't made.)
 

 
*Note: If you see any exclamation points in there, that's where Emmy added comments.