Netherlands #1of6

(Except Amsterdam and Giethoorn)

Our impression of The Netherlands? Lots of lovely homes, many with a large, sparkling clean picture window with lace curtains pulled to the side, so we can look right into the living room. An occasional windmill, millions of bikes, too much trash beside the roads and streets, and of course dog mess on the sidewalk. The national “sign” for The Netherlands should be a picture of a sidewalk with a pile of dog mess with a shoe print, and the several places on the sidewalk where someone tried to clean his shoe.

Soon after arriving in Holland one year, we stopped at a US Army Cemetery in Margraten, in the Province of Limburg in the Netherlands, not far from Maastricht. A beautiful grassy area donated by the Dutch government. This is the final resting place of 8,302 US service men.

We were near the Holland/ Belgium/ Germany borders where there are acres of concrete tank traps still sticking up out of the ground. They were used to delay or stop tanks and other vehicles, that tried to travel across these fields during WW II.

Emmy really liked the flea market in Nijmegan. (We’ll let you know if we find a flea market she doesn’t like!) Raining all the time. A large part of Nijmegan’s market was filled with fruit and flowers, and Emmy found a smoked mackerel fish for 85 cents — delicious, she later reported! Emmy bought a small brass planter with blue ceramic handles, and after we were in the camper and ready to leave town, we had to find another parking place, then run through the rain to get a brass coffee pot she can’t live without — not for coffee, just for because.

Several times, in the Netherlands, we have seen trucks going door to door selling groceries. I remember the Hucksters (grocery store in a truck) at my Grandmother’s home in Indiana years ago, and Emmy remembers a vegetable man who came to the house when she lived in Schiller Park, near Chicago. Years ago, in Pennsylvania, the meat and milk man, in a horse-drawn wagon, stopped at my home. Not a milkman delivering bottles of milk, but one who poured milk from his ten gallon can into a smaller can, and a butcher who had large pieces of meat, that he would cut to order! I know all about delivering bottled milk, I did that myself years ago, in both Pennsylvania, and in Chicago.