April 21, 2012 Ah, Holland, I do so love you, but did you have to rain on our parade!

Another trip to Holland. I do so love Holland. Germany has its good points, but Holland (Netherlands, whatever you want to call it by preference) has so many good attributes too. All those flowers, all that cheese, flat lands that would make bicycle riding so easy, the chocolate, and the list goes on. But, I digress. So I signed up for another trip to Keukenhof. Last months trip was nice, but didn't quite give the "full smack you in the face my gosh this is so beautiful" kind of feeling. So this month I signed up through USO for an overnight that included the flower parade, a trip to a delft factory (not the cheap knockoff delft; the real, hand painted delft), the Hague, Keukenhof, and the ocean (at the North Sea).

Needless to say, this trip included an early (or late depending on your perspective) take off time: 1:30 am. So I went to work on Friday, then went and did some volunteer time at the CASF, then hung around there until it was time to drive back over to Vogelweh to get on the bus. Thank goodness on a 44 passenger bus there were only 40 on the tour, so I was lucky and got the seat set to myself...gives more room for napping. Of course before going anywhere I checked the weather forecast: 50s with 60% chance of rain...argg! Oh well the flowers would be pretty even if wet.

I get on the bus, get all comfy, and promptly went to sleep. I know at one point that they announced that we would be making a brief stop for driver change (by law the drivers have to change after so many hours). I opened one eye when the announcement was made and then promptly closed it again. Next thing I knew we were coming to our restaurant for breakfast. It was actually quite a nice breakfast at the Bruekelen Hotel. The funny thing about this hotel...it looks like a pagoda.

Then we were off to Noordwijk for the flower parade.This parade takes a 40 kilometer route starting in Noordwijk (where we watched it) to Haarlem.  The parade is sometimes called the face of Spring and is the most famous parade in the Netherlands. It wasn't a huge thing, but kind of interesting. Of course it might have been more interesting had it not started to rain on our parade :( Oh well, these things do happen. I found it so funny and yet so nice that anyone and everyone could be in it, and they did decorate an assortment of things, besides floats.

Uli, our bus driver, said that next year he is going to decorate his bus so that he can be in the parade too.

By the way, the parade route in Noordwijk starts out along the North Sea...my first view of the North Sea, ever (and a few other pictures from noordwijk):

loved this bench

Look at that sky, and that was before the parade started.

After the parade, we got back on the bus and attempted to dry off a little on the way to the Delft factory...its on the next blog entry :)