Tomorrow Is Another Day...

The Netherlands, Take 2

After a disappointing experience at the Keukenhof garden in the Netherlands last year, we knew that we'd have to give the tulips in Holland another shot to wow us this year.  And wowed we were.  While last spring we planned our trip too early in the season, all this spring I was on pins and needles worrying that we were going too late, especially with how unseasonably warm our March was in Europe.  I kept seeing beautiful photos posted by friends who had already visited the garden, and didn't think the tulips could possibly hold out much longer.  Fortunately for us, I think we were actually there right around their peak. 

But rewinding things a bit, we began our trip to the Netherlands with a short stop in beautiful Kinderdijk, a UNESCO world heritage site with nineteen picturesque windmills all built in the mid-1700s.  Kinderdijk translates to "children's dike", and is the setting for this charming tale (as told by Wikipedia):

In 1421, during the Saint Elizabeth flood of 1421, the Grote Hollandse Waard flooded, but the Alblasserwaard polder stayed unflooded. It is said that when the terrible storm had subsided, someone went on to the dike between these two areas, to see what could be saved. In the distance, he saw a wooden cradle floating on the waters. As it came nearer, some movement was detected. A cat was seen in the cradle trying to keep it in balance by jumping back and forth so that no water could get into it. As the cradle eventually came close enough to the dike for a bystander to pick up the cradle, he saw that a baby was quietly sleeping inside it, nice and dry. The cat had kept the cradle balanced and afloat. This folktale and legend has been published as "The Cat and the Cradle" in English.

When you comin' home, son?  I don't know when, but we'll get together then...  Anyway, it was truly the quintessential Dutch imagery.

The next day, we were off to the Keukenhof, where we reveled in the aforementioned flora, and even got to spend a little time petting cows and watching the peacocks rule the roost in the petting zoo.  There were still TONS of tulips in bloom, along with a huge variety of other gorgeous flowers, and we couldn't have possibly had better weather for our garden day.

On our last day, we daytripped into Amsterdam, enjoying one of the Sandeman free tours that wound us through the Red Light District, into the Jordaan, and throughout the city, ending across from the Anne Frank House.  After our tour, we enjoyed a leisurely lunch on a fixed canal boat, took a canal tour, and let the girls run off some steam in the park by the Rijksmuseum.  Although it was a dreary day, the only heavy rainfall occurred while we were under cover in the canal boat.

As we're entering what is likely our last year in Europe, I doubt we'll make it back to the Netherlands again before we leave, so I'm so happy that we were able to give it the second chance it deserved.  It is a stunning country with some of the friendliest, most polite residents we've come across anywhere on the continent, and visiting the Keukenhof, with the fields of blooming tulips surrounding us on all sides, will definitely always rank  among my most favorite travel memories.

Eight Days Until Thirteen Miles

Somehow, I'm down to only eight more days standing between me and my half marathon.  The 12 weeks of training has gone by crazy fast, but I'm actually feeling pretty good about my ability to meet my goal of running <12 minute miles.

I found an awesome relatively flat trail for my long runs--no easy feat in our village.  We live in an absolutely gorgeous area, with tons of beautiful running and biking trails, but we are also in the midst of a number of hills and valleys, making for great difficulty in finding 10 miles roundtrip of flat land!  But there's a nice hard packed dirt trail that runs along the train tracks for a while and then through some farmland, so it's not only free of hills, but also almost entirely free of cars.

I've been watching the weather with some trepidation ever since the 31st came within the 10 day forecast.  It changes from hour to hour--this morning there was a 50% chance of showers, now it's down to 30%.  So, I will continue to stress over it for the next week instead of thinking about the fact that I will have to ambulate in a forward motion for 13.1 miles at what would typically be dinner time.

As I'm signed up for a night marathon, the question of what to eat throughout the day and when to stop eating has been on my mind almost as much as the weather.  I'm leaning toward a late lunch of spaghetti with parmesan and a pre-run snack of a Larabar and a banana, and I'll just have to hope that, um, the plumbing all cooperates.

So, this is it.  I've got three more runs and a day of cross training.  I've got my podcasts picked out (A little Judge John Hodgeman and Pop Culture Happy Hour to hopefully keep me giggling instead of crying).  I'll be gearing up in my favorite running capris and comfiest shirt, and I'm ready to go!  Or as ready as I'm going to be.

Now, to just get through the next eight days without breaking an ankle or picking up a terrible bronchial infection.  Wish me luck!

Fun With Memere

Just a few days after we returned home from the Champagne region, I was headed to the airport.  But not for me--I was picking up my most favorite momsicle on the entire planet!  After scooping up my mom at the curb, we headed into the city of Frankfurt for the day.  As many times as I'd been to the Frankfurt airport, this was my first time visiting the city.  And it was... okay?  There was a cute little main square surrounded by half timbered buildings, but the city was so heavily damaged in the war that much of what is there today is rebuilt after the 1950s.  But we still managed to have a great day and it helped in staving off the looming jet lag sleepies!

It was so great seeing the girls interact with their memere for the first time since November.  Even though they hadn't seen her in person for about 5 months, they recognized her and were so excited to see her all because of our weekly Skype visits.

The first weekend of her visit, we went to the Luisenpark in Mannheim for their Easter Egg Market and fell totally in love with the park.  It is the most beautiful park we've found so far in Germany.  The tulips were at their peak, there were large grassy fields for the girls to run in, a gorgeous Chinese garden, peaceful meandering paths--there was no way we could fit everything into a single day.

Our next big adventure was the Easter Egg hunt that our squadron put on for all the little kiddies.  They made the very smart move to have a separate area for the littlest kids to hunt eggs, where the eggs were just scattered on the grass.  I was a little skeptical about how it would go down since this was the girls' first hunt, but Charlotte was an immediate natural.  The minute we released her into the grass, she was snatching up plastic eggs and hurling them into her basket like a champ.  Annabelle took a little longer to get the hang of it, but by the end of the hunt, she had collected her fair share.  As for the poor Easter bunny, Charlotte was absolutely smitten and couldn't take her eyes off of him, but Annabelle reacted like a cat to a big tub of water--hissing, scratching, yowling--she was not having it!

 

After that Easter teaser, the real day arrived and the Easter Bunny brought their baskets during nap time.  The girls definitely didn't fully understand why they suddenly were presented with baskets full of candy and bunny related paraphernalia, but they seemed pretty excited about the whole thing.

The weather was playing nice, so we decided to head to our favorite local park, the Gartenschau, for a picnic and to give the Easter Bunny--or Oster Hase since we were amongst the locals--another shot.  The picnic went smashingly, the creepy Hase about the same as before.

We put the cherry on the top of my mom's visit with a wonderful trip to the Netherlands, but that's another story, for another post.  The weeks with my mom went by so quickly, all of us girls were pretty sad when she had to head back home.  But the good news is that she is returning with my dad in 5 weeks and they'll be here for a month and a half--woohoo!!

Drinking Champagne in Champagne

Oh my, so much catching up to do from the last month!  April whizzed by in the blink of an eye as we kept ourselves busy with a trip to France, hosting my aMAHzing mom for a few weeks, and heading back to the Netherlands for another shot at the glorious spring tulips.

We realized rather belatedly that April 4th was a holiday for the Air Force, so we decided to pull on our spontaneity pants and book a quick trip to the Champagne region in France, which is only about 3 hours away from us--I don't think I'll ever get tired of being able to say crazy things like that!  We booked an apartment in Reims, and hit the road.

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Once we were settled into our rooms, we had a half day to fill, so we headed to the Reims cathedral.  And as things in Europe are and ever shall be, the famous entryway was covered in scaffolding.  Fortunately for us, we've become rather expert at finding angles from which you'd never know Europe is constantly undergoing reburbishment!  The Reims cathedral has seen more kings of France crowned than Notre Dame in Paris, and is most famous as the cathedral to which Joan of Arc brought Charles VII to be consecrated in 1429.  A more contemporary claim to fame are the primarily blue stained glass windows done by Marc Chagall in the 1970s

The next day, we followed along with Rick Steves on an auto tour through the Route Touristique du Champagne, with stops in some of the more charming towns and stunning views over the rolling champagne vineyards.

Highlights of the drive included a sweet little park along a river where the girls were rewarded for their car riding patience with plenty of running around and trips up and down the slide, and a stop in Hautvillers to visit Dom Perignons final resting place and do a champagne tasting at the G. Tribaut champagne house.

For our final day in the champagne region, we stopped in Epernay to visit the Mercier champagne house, chosen primarily for the fact that we could visit the caves by elevator and train, rather than trying to navigate stairs and uneven terrain while carrying the little ones.  It was a very informative tour, made all the more enjoyable by the champagne tasting and purchasing at the end!

All in all, the trip was an excellent combination of sightseeing and relaxation, as well as allowing me to learn a little more about champagne than which orange juice into which it is best mixed!