The Netherlands

People have asked which was my favorite country to visit and I’ve responded Scotland, but as I prepared to post the blog on Holland I realized how many pictures I wanted to show because I have the fondest memories in Holland. However, the memories aren’t of the beautiful, old buildings, the canals or the cheese stores (which were all great), it’s the memories we made with my family while we were there.

My grandparents were the reason for our trip to Holland in the first place. This September will be their 50th wedding anniversary and since they both immigrated from Holland, they thought it would be fun to celebrate over there with relatives that still live there.
So we flew into Amsterdam and stayed a night in our hostel in the Red Light District.
We did see all the typical things you'd expect to see in Amsterdam; canals,

wooden shoes,

Open air markets,

where we bought stroopwafel made right in front of us (so good!!!)

cheese stores where you can sample all different kinds of cheese (also so good),

and parking lots just for bikes. Our canal tour informed us that the canals are 1/3 water, 1/3 dirt, and 1/3 bike.
Amsterdam needs the bike parking lots because there are so many people in the city and there isn't room for everyone to drive cars. Guess that's why some choose to drive a car like this:
This is Dam Square. See how many people there are?
And of course we enjoyed gebakjes (dutch pastries).
After time in Amsterdam we got our own little car,
packed all our things in it,and drove to these cabins on a working dairy farm to stay with my family. My grandma found these cabins and reserved them for us. They were absolutely adorable!

There were 14 of us from the States that came to stay in 3 cabins on this farm in Woubrugge. Here's everybody: my aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunt and uncle, sister and grandpa. Unfortunately despite all her planning my grandma wasn't able to make the trip. She was missed horribly.

This is the dining room. See those doors?

That is where Ben and I slept.

One night we invited friends and relatives still living in Holland to come to the farm for a visit. Here is a group picture of everyone who was able to make it. It was fun to meet relatives I'd never seen before (or at least remembered seeing them before).

Also at the cabins were row boats.

We all took turns rowing.
The first day at the cabins we went to a little town named Leiden. My grandpa was kind enough to take us to a pannenkoekenhuis. This is where they serve "pancakes" bigger than your face. I had ham, cheese and mushrooms on mine. I couldn't finish it it was so big -but delicious!
The next day my aunts and uncles wanted to go to Amsterdam but since we'd just been there we got to spend a day with my grandpa. He took us to Scheveningen to this little restaurant on the beach. Here is my grandpa being responsible and protecting his head from the sun since he forgot his hat.
And Ben enjoying his long island ice tea.
Brittany found this good looking Dutchman.
After Scheveningen my grandpa thought it would be a good idea to see the Parliament building in Den Haag. He gave me a map of the COUNTRY and told him to navigate to the building in the CITY. (By the way, this is not possible). Instead we drove around for about 4 hours in circles -never to find the elusive Parliament building. We did however make a wrong turn into a parking garage and had to pay to get out of the stupid thing. Ben and Brittany in the backseat thought this whole adventure was quite hilarious.
The next day all 14 of us went to Delft. This was perhaps my favorite city in Holland. It was so quaint and welcoming. Ben and I climbed to the top of this church (375 steps),
and saw this view.
Another example of the canals in Holland.
Delft is where they make Delft's Blue so we went to the factory to see how it's made.
Everything is hand painted. The paint goes on black and when it's fired it comes out blue.
The other thing people think of when thinking of Holland is windmills so we were to Kinderdijk where they have lots of those.

And there's our 3 week trip in 3 blog posts. We really did have such a great time!

Scotland

I know the anticipation has been killing everyone so without further delay here is our time in Scotland:

We flew into Edinburgh
and were completely overwhelmed with the amount of old, well preserved buildings in such a concentrated area.
Since Scotland is part of the UK there were still cool telephone booths like this one:

One of the major attractions in Edinburgh is the Edinburgh Castle which sits atop a hill over looking the entire city.

We wanted to stay out late one night to get a picture of it at dark all lit up, but this was taken at midnight and it still wasn't dark. We were too tired to stay out later so this as close to it being lit up as we got.

A view from the castle:

Scotland is famous for deep fried candy bars. Here is one of the deep fried Snickers we enjoyed.

And what trip isn't complete without an old man sleeping on a bench? So cute.

Next we took the bus to St. Andrews. Here is what remains of the cathedral.

St. Andrews Castle.

Some may know St. Andrews because that is where Prince William and Kate went to school, but to others, St. Andrews is known because it is considered to be where golf originated from. The Old Course has hosted the British Open more than any other golf course in the world. The bridge Ben is standing on is the "famous" Swilcan Bridge on the 18th hole of the Old Course. Many famous golfers have walked on this bridge.“I’d like to see the fairways more narrow. Then everybody would have to play from the rough, not just me.” Seve Ballestero

From St. Andrews we took a bus to Stirling for the day. Stirling has two main attractions; Stirling Castle and the William Wallace Monument.

Unfortunately these 2 attractions are about 2.5 miles apart. See? There is the William Wallace Monument as viewed from the castle:

But we walked all the way! For those who love history (my husband), this is Stirling Bridge where William Wallace won the battle against the British saving Scotland. If you want more details, watch Braveheart; Mel Gibbson is William Wallace in that movie.

After Stirling we went to Glasgow. This city was in stark contrast to Edinburgh. Edinburgh had charm and history, Glasgow had people.

It did have this cool building in George Square.

And this Cathedral.

And this arch as an entry into a really nice city park:

This is Glasgow University. Could you imagine if this was your school? How cool!

You can't tell in this picture but we are actually sitting in a cemetery leaning up against a monument to somebody. It just felt so good to sit.

One more country to go...

Where to start?

Ben and I just got back from a 3week trip to Europe and came back with over 1400 pictures. Since no one in their right mind wants to look at that many pictures we've been trying to cut them down, but it takes so long to go through that many pictures.

So I've been trying to figure out how to present the pictures and our trip on my blog; first I thought I'll do a day by day blog for the next 21 days representing each day of the trip and showing pictures from each day. Then I realized there was no way I wanted to commit to 21 consecutive days blogging. Then I thought I could do a blog post per city we visited. But then I realized that was 15+ cities and again I didn't want to do that much. So then I decided I would do 3 blog posts -1 for each country we visited. However, that means I have to cut a lot of pictures out in a mild attempt to make the posts not too long.

With all that said, the first country we visited was Ireland. We flew into Dublin, stayed there for 3 nights and then spent the next several days traveling and staying in Cork, Galway, and Blarney.

We stayed in hostels while we were in Ireland which means we were staying in a room with anywhere from 4-10 people per room. This is our hostel in Dublin.

Here Ben and I are in front of Dublin Castle.

Right next to the castle were these buildings painted cool colors. I have no idea what the buildings are used for but I liked the way they looked. This is St Patrick's Cathedral. Since we were still on West Coast time we woke up really early the first day which allowed this picture without people in it since normal people were still sleeping at that time.

My sister Brittany also came on the trip with us. We saw a postcard in Dublin that had doors on it, because there are a lot of cool doors in Dublin so Brittany and I started taking pictures of the cool doors we saw with the intent to scrapbook a page of just doors from our trip. Here we got 3 cool doors in 1 picture.

And of course a trip to Dublin isn't complete without a tour of the Guinness Storehouse. Here we are in the tasting room. Don't tell but I thought the beer was gross. It was cool to take the tour because at the end of the tour you go into a bar that is about 10 stories high with windows that provide a 360 degree view of the city.

Another church in Dublin with beautiful landscaping.

After a few days in Dublin we took a bus to Cork. This is the church we found there.

A cool door we found in Cork.

From Cork we took a bus to Blarney to see the Blarney Castle and LOOK at the Blarney stone. I know you're supposed to kiss it but after being warned by a friend of all the germs on the stone I figured I'm already chatty enough and didn't need to be endowed with the gift of gab from the stone as legend states.
The view from the top of the castle.

Ireland reminded me a lot of Oregon with its hilly green view. This is a view from within the castle.

Our next stop was Galway where Ben found this cool hat in one of the souvenir shops. As you may have guessed by our coats and beanies it was quite cold in Ireland but mostly dry.

In Galway we took a bus tour through the Burren and onto the Cliffs of Moher. These rocks mark the grave of 30+ people who, according to our bus driver, were determined to have died from arthritis (I think that's what he said -given his Irish accent he was a little difficult to understand). However, that same bus driver also told us we would never meet a bus driver who wasn't crazy. The roads are so narrow and we commented on how impressed we were with his driving skills. He bragged that he hadn't lost a side view mirror yet -but he'd only been on the job for 2 months!

The Cliffs of Moher:

From Galway we took a bus ride back to Dublin and flew out of Dublin to Scotland. Our adventure (we stopped calling our trip a vacation about 3 days into the trip when we realized how much walking we were doing and how exhausted we were at the end of the day. We figure by the end of the trip we likely walked over 60 miles!) through Scotland blog post will be coming soon...

Five years

Five years ago today Ben and I married. To celebrate he took me to Portland City Grill for dinner and Gerry Frank's Konditorei for dessert. It seems like the five years have flown by and I feel so lucky to be married to such a wonderful man.

I was going to put up pictures of our wedding day but those are all tucked away in an album safely secured so I figured instead I would post pictures of the trip when Ben proposed.

I was studying abroad in Spain and Ben was at Fort Leonardwood, MO at basic training. When he completed basic I bought him a ticket so he could come visit me.

December 4, 2005 in Sevilla, Spain. This is the exact spot where Ben asked me to be his wife. It overlooks the gardens of the royal grounds.
Ben loves this picture of us on a bench in Sevilla enjoying Spanish tortilla sandwiches.

Here we are in Lisbon, Portugal.

We also got to visit Granada, Spain.