Second breakfast, picnic style

Our daily schedule when we travel looks like today;

breakfast at 7:30 in our place, this time it was a B&B in Leiden,

on the road by 8:30,

stop in the next town after 9:00 to pick up groceries for lunch,

find a picnic spot by 10:00 for sandwiches and snacks

(notice the great sneeze shot of Matthew?)

find a rest spot at 11:00, usually with a stroop waffle snack

stop for lunch at 12:00, today it was at a beach just outside Delft. (the funny part about the beach was the fact that it was a nude beach, normal for Holland, not so normal for my surprised kids....naked Opas and Omas...not so pretty.)

Canal shot in Delft

Another brilliant shot by Rob. This is the canal right in front of the Vermeer house.

The Girl with the Pearl Earring

We went to the Vermeer house in Delft and saw where Vermeer painted his masterpieces. I've been reading the novel "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" out loud to the kids on this trip (thanks Sharon!!), so it was pretty cool to see Delft today and compare it to how the book describes it in Vermeer's seventeenth century. We saw the canal where Griet, the maid in the book, has to collect wash water, and the market square in front of Nieuw Kerk where the Vermeer children played. We went into Nieuw Kerk where Griet tried to pray, the same church where Willem of Orange is buried. What a cool city. Lots of blue too.

Don't fall in the sloot! to Delft..

We biked 36 km today from Leiden to Delft, and for a while we biked alongside this canal. There was no barrier, just a drop-off into the water. Jessica has bet ten euros that Matthew would drive into a sloot on this trip, and today I was seriously concerned that someone might just do that. Fortunately, we all stayed on the road.

Windy day at the lake

We had dinner last night at a lovely lakeside restaurant that was close to our B&B in Leiden, and we watched the windsurfers. The wind held all evening, so all twenty windsurfers kept playing on the water.

The North Sea

At Zandfort aan Zee, we stopped for a break at the beach. The kids picked shells, and Sarah and I put our feet in the Sea. Brrr!

The good news was this: the wind was very strong, but it was a tailwind the whole day. This was a brilliant cycling day; sunshine, wind, twenty degrees and fun people. We made it into Leiden after about fifty kilometers and everyone still had energy to walk and play at a park.

The Dunes to Leiden

Yesterday we biked from Haarlem to Leiden, and about ten kilometers was throught the Dunes along the North Sea. The funny part was that the morning before, Rob and I had biked along this route without the kids (one of our before breakfast 30 km rides for exercise), and along this same route I saw about a hundred bunnies and about 30 deer. So I told the kids they'd be able to count bunnies and deer (so far we've been counting herons). Together this time we saw two bunnies and no deer. None. So now everyone thinks I lie. My theory is that these animals only come out in the early morning.