Netherlands- Arnhem, Amersfoort, Gouda, Delft, Veere

It’s kind of crazy to think that last month we were bouncing around from town to city in the Netherlands. We started off our trip in Arnhem, then visited Amersfoort, Gouda, Delft, and Veere. Time has flown! But we're excited to finally be posting about it.

We loved all the greenery and forests in the Netherlands ( living in Florida really makes us miss this!)…and we were very inspired by how active people of all ages are in the Netherlands. We felt like most of our trip involved forest bathing and our body loved it!. Eating cheese and pancakes were also involved. 🙂

Our family and we ( our husband, mother, father, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and two nephews), all went on a European adventure of sorts last month. We were invited to a wedding in Belgium, and since the trip is so far away, we decided to do a bit of site-seeing both before and after the wedding.

We flew into Amsterdam and visited the Netherlands and Belgium for one week, then we attended the wedding, and then we spent a week in Stockholm.

Arnhem

We started off staying at Hotel Groot Warnsborn, a beautiful estate in the middle of the forest, beside the town of Arnhem.

The scenery here was beyond peaceful and beautiful, full of trees and trails. You could spend hours exploring and never see it all.

And if that wasn’t good enough, the breakfast here was great… they have fresh bread made every morning…. along with local fruit, honey, jams, yogurt and cheese. And they had fresh eggs and bacon. We were in breakfast heaven.

(The red oval thing on our plate is a plum! And one of our favorite we've had.)

One thing that we loved about this hotel and this area was that there are a ton of outdoor activities, such as life size chess, lots of children’s cars /toys, and miles and miles of forest trails to walk or bike around.

We spent hours walking the grounds here, and our nephews really enjoyed it as well.

Look how tiny we are in this forest?! We can still smell the fresh air…

Side note: keep an eye out for our sister’s son Hugo’s famous stink-eye. haha

We found this to be a really family-friendly place, and we were astonished at how active everyone in the area was.

As we mentioned a bit earlier, it was very inspiring for us to see so many people of all ages walking, hiking and biking.

Honestly, we've never seen a more active population in our travels. Especially an active elderly population.

It made us realize how we need to change our habits NOW. We do workout and walk etc, but it isn’t the same as the amount of activity there.

EVERYONE is walking around or biking. We mean we can’t tell you how many thousands of people that were biking around every single day.

We do not see this amount of movement where we are from, and it really made us start to wonder why.

Yes it is hot in Florida, but we think the problem is more the way that cities and towns are set up in the USA. We don’t really have town centers that cater to walking and biking. Everything here is SOOO spread out and massive.

And we don’t mean to offend anyone, but our observations were that this active lifestyle resulted in older people being in much better shape in the Netherlands than in the United States.

Well, that was a huge tangent! But this really was a big thing that we noticed during our time in Arnhem.

One of the main reasons we stayed in this area was to go to the Kröller-Müller Museum.

It’s been on our father’s bucket list for years now, and has a huge selection of Van Gogh pieces, which we were excited about.

Van Gogh is our favorite painter, and we found myself mesmerized by the colors and textures of his paintings.

How can you not be happy after looking at such color?! It was hard to look away from some of his paintings sometimes. If you are ever in the area, we highly highly recommend this museum!

After visiting the musuem, we needed lunch!

We found a great cafe, Eetcafé De 3-Ster, that had cute outdoor seating with big pillows to sit on and a really friendly guy that worked there. We ended up having great sandwiches and dutch bacon pancakes.

The bacon pancakes weren’t actually on the menu, but we LOVE them, and they happily made them for us. 🙂 🙂

Amersfoort

We took a day trip to Amersfoort after we saw a photo of one of the waterfront entrances to the city and did some research on the medieval town center of the city.

We were not dissapointed in our decision to visit. There are several canals surrounding the city, with beautiful homes on the water and lots of romantic trees.

This is seriously a really dreamy city.

The inside of Amersfoort has cobblestone streets, quaint shops and buildings, and beautiful details to soak in.

We walked around for hours, taking photos, and going into shops until we got hungry and needed a snack.

We didn’t want a meal, but some coffee and snacks, so we ended up going to Coffee Corazon.

This was a wonderful decision!

Since our sister, brother, father, and we are allergic to nuts, we ordered one of every dessert that they had that didn’t have nuts in them, and shared them all so we could taste.

We ended up with from-scratch cheesecake, chocolate cake and dutch apple pie. It was all SO GOOD.

We then took one last look at some of the Amersfoort sites to take some photos and headed to our next stop.

( the stink eye! )

Het Loo Palace

Next, we did half a day at the Palace Het Loo. This palace, built in the 1600s, is different than other castle/ palaces that we have visited in Europe.

For starters, you walk into a stable of sorts, which has peacocks running around in the grass. Then, you walk down a long tree-lined path to the palace.

The architecture is very neat and orderly. It’s beautiful, but in a way is less extravagant on the outside than say, castles in France, but the inside was certainly just as extravagant.

But the most impressive part, for us, was the great gardens behind the palace. When we did some research on the Palace Het Loo prior to our visit, the gardens were described as the “Versailles of Holland”, with a baroque vibe.

We didn’t really know what to expect, but we were blown away by the layers and layers of great flowers, plants, and fountains.

This would be a really fun spot for a picnic and to breathe in some fresh air. We spent the afternoon feeding fish in one of the fountains, looking all of the unique flowers, and exploring.

Gouda

Our next stop was getting some gouda in Gouda… Seriously. haha

We bought lots of cheese in a really cute shop in Gouda and have been enjoying it to this day. Our favorite part about lots of the cheese shops here that you can taste pretty much all of their cheeses. There are and endless number of types and flavors of gouda and it’s soooo fresh.

Gouda as a city is a bit more commercialized than we were expecting, but it had some really beautiful areas and lots of shops.

We ended up choosing to walk on smaller side streets to get away from the crowds, and to get a feel for what life was really like in Gouda.

The smaller side streets had so many cute buildings and details to look at and the stores in them were actually better than in the center of town.

One of our favorite experiences here was visiting a chocolate shop called PUUR chocolate. We were drawn to the storefront and popped in to check it out, but then the great smell of fresh chocolate was almost too much to handle.

We immediately got our family and we all started checking out what chocolate we wanted to buy.

But in the process, the owner started letting us taste his creations. He let us try his chocolate in it’s pure form, some of the ganaches he was creating and testing, and his most popular chocolates.

It was so fun, and soooo satisfying. Look at our face here! haha He just told us about his passion fruit chocolate… we couldn’t handle it.

This was our favorite chocolate that we had our whole entire trip and definitely one of our favorite of our life. If you happen to be in Gouda, this is a must try!

Delft

Our last night in the Netherlands was spent in Delft.

Delft is famous for it’s blue and white pottery, called Delftware.

We ended up going to the official Delft museum and checking out the pottery… or more like and buying some pottery. haha

We really loved Delft. It has lots of charming buildings, canals, and open spaces full of outdoor seating and outdoor restaurants.

It also has a very young vibe. We believe there is a university… or two… in Delft and you could see students everywhere.

Or at least the night that we were there. It seemed like there was some sort of a fraternity and sorority recruitment night going on. We know they don’t have this in Europe, but we think they do similar type events between the different department or schools within a university.

Either way, there were LOTS of boat parties with live bands on these big barges, and lots of college students wearing matching t-shirts… pretty much all over Delft.

It looked really fun, and it made us wish that we had considered studying abroad here way back in the day. haha

We ended up site seeing and then eating dinner at one of the outdoor cafes.

We can’t remember the name of it but we had some traditional dutch beef stew, and then fruit and ice-cream in a dutch shoe.

Veere

We went to Veere on our drive to Belgium. And we have to say of all the towns and all the places that we saw in the Netherlands, this was our favorite hidden gem.

We drove along the coast to get here, which was beautiful in itself, and we weren’t sure what to expect, except that we read many recommendations not to miss this town.

We're glad we followed those tips because. WOW

To us it felt like history had stopped in time and we were in the most beautiful magical historic small village.

We walked into town and the first thing we saw was a man making from-scratch stroopwaffles. The smell was SO GOOD. We honestly don’t know if anyone can walk by without stopping. A stroopwaffle is basically crispy waffles with caramel sandwiched in the middle.

We ate several on our trip but these fresh ones were hands down our favorite ones.

We were surrounded by ice cream shops, small candy shops, boats and water and everyone seemed so happy and relaxed here.

We walked around, soaking in the quaint beauty of this village…wishing that we booked a hotel here so that we could have spent more time here.

Then, we stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe called ‘T Waepen of Veere and it was SOOO good.

We had great cheese croquettes and our brother and father had a smoked salmon sandwich. They both said it was our favorite smoked salmon they had ever had.

Veere was a breathe of fresh air…a clean, quaint, beautiful village on an island, which really captured the magic of The Netherlands.