Bayeux, Cherbourg, Ireland, Chicago, Michigan...Chicago?

July 21 to Present Day
We spent a day in Bayeux, France which isn’t on the shore where D-day happened, but slightly inland. They were one of the first cities liberated from the Germans by the Allies. They still fly the flags of all the different countries the helped liberate France from the Nazis. We walked through the cemetery and the ever present memorials. It appeared that the only thing the city had going for them was tourism due to the historical events of the city’s past. But, it was well kept and quite the enjoyable little town. After that we took a ferry from France to Ireland. It was an 18 hour overnight trip. The choppy waters made TJ and me a little off balance the whole next day trying to readjust to solid ground. We had to have looked like drunkards walking down the sidewalk. Ireland was particularly relaxing because we were finally among English language speakers again, strong accents, but at least it was English never the less. Ireland is very much like all the stereotypes: strong Irish accents; lots of red haired, fair skinned people; lots of drizzling rain that would stop and start a lot. We explored 2 castles while in Ireland. And our last night in Europe, TJ and I splurged on a nice 4 course Chinese restaurant, which was a nice time to sit, relax, and reflect on our trip to Europe.

Our 7 hour flight left Ireland at 2:20 PM July 23rd and landed at 4:30 in Chicago. There is nothing like flying thru 5 time zones to screw up your sleeping schedule. My dad and Beppe (my grandma) picked us at the airport and drove us to Michigan. It was so sweet, because I wasn’t looking forward to another 4 hour train ride to get us home. Thanks Dad and Beppe!! We have been hanging out with family this weekend. Later today (Sunday) we are going to take off to Chicago again, now that we have picked up our car with some of our belongings. Due to some desperate circumstances that my previous and now current company is going through, I’m going to be working in Chicago this week, and TJ is going to be chilling out near Joliet. So, feel free to call him if you want to hang out! We are down to one cell phone because my phone died in Europe. If you want to call us, use TJ’s cell phone number.

After this week, the plan is to spend another weekend in Michigan and then take off to Texas on Sunday. At this point, our plan has changed more than Dennis Rodman’s hair color during the Bulls era, so we really aren’t positive if this is “the plan” (okay, to clarify TJ added that last sentence...Heidi doesn't really know who Dennis Rodman is or the apparent personality crisis that he was going through during the mid 90's). We will write more later on. Thanks for all the prayers and advice while we were in Europe!

7/20-22

Barcelona to Paris to Bayeux to Cherbourg - France

Well, we’re three days shy of being gone for a month. We’ve left Barcelona and headed north east. We took a 3 hour train to Cerbere, which is on the French/Spain border. It was a quaint resort town. Heidi and I ate pizza…which for the record tastes nothing like American pizza. We’re looking forward to eating some good old fashioned Pizza Hut style pizza. Regardless, we then jumped on a night train from Barcelona to Paris, which took all of about 12 hours. We got the last seat available on the train and one bed because there were no seats left. Although we were separated, after camping out for basically the last 2 weeks straight, we enjoyed sleeping on the train…especially the one who got the bed :). After arriving in Paris at 8:30 in the morning, we received a free 4 day pass to all the museums in Paris (from someone leaving Paris)…that was good for one last day. Heidi and I took advantage of it and went to the Louvre. We surprisingly, really enjoyed it, especially the free baggage storage. I guess they don’t want crazy backpackers knocking over priceless artifacts. After our incredibly lengthy hike from the train station to the Louvre with our backpacks, we decided that we would save about $5 and continue to walk around Paris. We have no idea how far we walked, but we managed to take some great pictures of us at the Eiffel Tower. We enjoyed Paris, and had no run-ins with the “Rude French”.
P.S. we got rid of the free pass to some Canadians.
Also, due to our lack of money and an urging to get back to the states (due to a number of things…wanting a real Diet Coke, Johnnies beef, a mattress, Heidi’s work calling and e-mailing her showing a desire for her to help them out, wanting an idea of where we’re moving to other than “Dallas”, and numerous other factors) we decided to see what our airline could do about getting us back to the states a week early. After a lot of busy work, a pricey phone bill, and a great kink in the plan leaving us in Ireland for 2 days, we’re on our way to the area where D-day/The Battle of Normandy took place and then taking a ferry to Ireland. Yay boat trips!
We’ll write more soon!

July 12-19

It’s been quite a while since we last blogged, it's been difficult to find internet access.
Well, after Rome we decided to check out the leaning tower of Pisa. After reading up on Pisa, everything we heard was that Pisa was the type of town that you can see in just an afternoon. So, we got on the train in the morning and got to Pisa by noon. We took a bus out to Pisa…although we could easily have walked to the tower (we did end up walking back). We’ve learned that the tourism offices always tell you to take public transportation…although it’s quicker to walk to most places than wait for the busses to show up. Oh, and while I’m on that subject. Busses stink. There’s never a good map for them on the bus, and they never have enough information for tourists like us to know where they’re taking you. You have to basically guess as to where you want to be dropped off.
So all the guides we read and watched were correct. Pisa was definitely taken care off in an afternoon. Actually, Heidi and I were done by about 3. 3 hours in Pisa was sufficient (that included walking back from the tower and eating lunch in a sit down restaurant). We got back to the train station and were informed that Italian trains were out of service due to a RAILROAD STRIKE! We got a little nervous since there really wasn’t much else to do in Pisa. We managed to find a Texan stationed in Italy on vacation with his mom. He was also trying to get out of Pisa. They had been jumping from track to track trying to get on a train that was actually moving. Long story short, we jumped on a train to Genova, which is halfway between Pisa, Italy and Nice, France. We thought that would be a good location since Nice was halfway between Rome and Barcelona, our next big city to hit.
Sadly, we were mistaken. Genova wasn’t a good city. Actually, there was nothing in Genova. No camping, no trains out, no cheap hotels. Instead we stayed at the train station overnight until 6:15, when the next train to Nice would head out. Let me tell you, staying in a train station over night was not the highlight of the trip. Well, we got to Nice, and that wasn’t much better. Fortunately they had camping, unfortunately we had to walk about 3 miles up hill to get to it. After a long night of not sleeping in a train station walking 3 miles up hill wasn’t all that great. Also, the only way we’d make it to Barcelona was by taking a train at 6 am. That would mean we would have to get up at 4:30 to make the 3 mile journey (downhill this time) to get to the train station. For the record, we walked about 12 miles that day…on little sleep. We had to go into town once to purchase food, plus the walk back to the train station and obviously we needed to go to the beach. They had stone beaches, not nearly as much fun as Lake Michigan’s sand beaches.
After all that walking I managed to get blisters all over my feet. They started off small and I ignored them, which doesn’t do well for blisters. One managed to go between my toes and was bigger than a silver dollar. I had to hobble around for a while…and then it exploded…just kidding, but it was painful. I’d post a picture but I don’t want to gross you out any more than I already have.
Everything has been great since we made it to Barcelona. We’ve decided we wanted to relax and enjoy our vacation…and actually have a vacation. We’re camping about 150 feet from the beach (a nice sandy beach). We’ve been able to rest everything accept our newly acquired sunburns. We haven’t decided our next step, but we’ve been enjoying Barcelona so much that we probably won’t leave for a while. Sorry Tolee, that probably means that we won’t be making it to Morocco, as fun as that sounds like it would be.

Rome – July 9-11

Heidi and I have been camping at a campsite on the outskirts of Rome for the last three days. For some reason, maybe it’s because of the movies or my high school used old text books, but the place isn’t as old as I figured it would be. It’s strange because you’ve got ruins dated to 4 B.C. and then you’ve got brand new office buildings right next to it. I guess you need new buildings, or all of Rome would be considered ruins. Yesterday we went on a “hop on – hop off” bus tour. We were able to see The Coliseum, some ancient ruins, old churches and other things on our 11 stop tour. We went inside the Sistine Chapel and saw Michelangelo and Raphael’s work. It was quite impressive, but the heat and long lines made viewing the chapel a bit anticlimactic after everything was said and done.
My personal favorite happened today. We went to the San Callisto Catacombs. Because of persecution and Roman rules, Christian martyrs and others were buried in underground tombs on the outskirts of the city. They would worship God through music, painting, communion and the teaching of God’s Word in these catacombs. It was thrilling to be in the very spot of some of the great men and women of the faith. Unfortunately because of vandals and age the tombs have been emptied and empty holes are the only thing left.

Heidi and I also saw some random things that we thought were quite interesting. First, when we were in the Vatican Museum (where you have to go to get to the Sistine chapel). It was run by the Roman Catholic Church. The amount of Greek Mythology and Iconography that was in the Vatican was sickening. Things that God told the Israelites to destroy and things that were detestable to God were clearly on display throughout the Vatican. Also, while Heidi at the Sistine Chapel we saw signs saying that it was closing early, which we found out later was because the Obama’s were going to be visiting it later that day…ha ha, we saw it first! We even saw the presidential motorcade pull out of the Vatican. Unfortunately they blocked the road off to everybody until all 25 or so vehicles made it out, causing us to miss our bus.

We decided to camp one more night in Rome, so we will be heading out of Rome on our way to Spain tomorrow morning. I don’t know when the next time we will be able to post, so until next time!
(This is now Heidi) So our camping village had a band last night, who played all oldies, which all but a few were in English. They played some songs from the movie “Grease” which I know and really enjoy. Part way thru TJ and I realized that the lead singer didn’t speak any English. So he did pretty good mimicking the songs, but quite a few times you could tell he was just making some sort of sound like that was similar to the song but his sentences didn’t make sense at all! It was pretty great.

Venice and Florence

July 9, 2009
Venice was wonderful. We stayed at a guy’s house. He had turned half of it into rented out rooms. It was quaint and cute. And he threw in a free Italian pizza because he owned a restaurant too. There were canals everywhere which made things tricky because the canals curve all over the place, and there wasn’t any road signs that I could understand so TJ and I got lost quite a bit. One night we were lost and we asked some guy on the street where the train station was because we could find our way from there. He explained and a he went on ahead and a little while later more people stopped him and asked him the same thing. This time he took them, and us, part way then explained it again. People getting lost in Venice is a common occurrence, might as well consider it part of the experience and enjoy it. There are no cars allowed on the island of Venice so the boats bring the supplies to the little shops. It was fun to see them tossing things out of boats for the shop keepers to catch.
After Venice we went to Florence where we camped out. The campsite had showers and gave us a map of the city. There are some great old buildings. We didn’t see the actual David sculpture, but there were replicas of him in 2 other places in which we did see. Florence has the 3rd oldest bridge (according to our pamphlet) and one of the only bridges with store buildings on it. Something we noticed about Italy so far is there seems to be an overwhelming amount of police everywhere. Also, they sure love their gelato (their version of ice cream). They have a shop at every street corner. I also have never seen some many naked statues. I think 50% of all the sculptures have absolutely no clothes on, and there is a lot of statues. Silliness! We are now on our way to Roma. We are going to try to camp there also because it worked out so well in Florence.

Oops forgot the pictures!

Oh, and there is a correction to the spelling of Shuart's name. Although it's pronounced Shuart they spell it, Sjoerd. Sorry Sjoerd!

Berlin, Munich, and the beautiful Italy

July 6, 2009
Berlin was interesting. We only spent a couple hours there. All I really wanted to see was the Berlin wall. I heard they have really great museums there, but the whole “everything is in German” thing kind of hinders us. I was actually surprised by how much of the wall was still there, and there was a well put together honest “documentation center” which we enjoyed. After that, TJ got a bratwurst because we are after all in Germany . It began to rain, it was the first day we were outside in the rain. To avoid the rain we then went to Munchen, or as we call it in America, Munich. We took a free walking tour which gave us some history of the city. Munich was the starting place of the Nazi party, but they are trying to “move past” that, and they have chosen to not do memorials or pretty much anything to remember what happened there during World War II. Many people in Germany, and TJ and I, think that is very cowardly way to handle the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust. It seems that people will forget what happened more than move past, but other than that, we liked the city. TJ and I climbed 14 stories of a church tower and had a grand view of the entire city which I enjoyed when I ignored all the butterflies in my stomach. We were outside the tower on a tiny ledge when the bells rang to inform us that it was 3 o’clock. It was pretty freaky, especially since the ledge, in my opinion, had very thin guard rails.
We stopped off in Innsbruck, Austria for the night. It was quite beautiful. I believe we are traveling through the Alps. The city itself looks very old, but very well kept. Heidi and I actually camped in the Alps…if that’s what they were. Paul’s tent that we are borrowing worked great. It’s about time we got to use it, since I’ve been carrying it in my backpack the whole trip. We didn’t have a rain fly on because it would have been too difficult to do since it was already dark when we started putting it up. It rained, but we were sheltered very nicely by trees and didn’t get wet at all! I woke up at 5am, hearing the rain, and started singing (in my head) a song that I learned during my college years that has the lyrics, “you are a shelter Lord, a sanctuary from the storm”. God protects us so well from so many things, and continues to do so! It’s still raining quite hard, but we are on our way to Italy. The mountains are amazing, God is so great.

So, Heidi and I are in Venice right now! It's awesome. We got a great deal on some old restaurant owners apartment. We're right on a canal! It's beautiful. Well, until next time.

Friesland! Home of the Happy Heidi

A few random things TJ and I have run into. We ordered milkshakes one day at a restaurant and they were warm, we weren’t expecting that! And cups are extremely small here. Chocolate milk is not refrigerated. Also, everybody has talked about how it is overwhelmingly and unusually hot for Europe, but we feel like it’s been great. It’s about 26 degrees Celsius during the afternoons, it cools off nicely at night. I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but we’ve thought it has been very pleasant. Also, their toilets do not flush…a pool of water constantly sits at the bottom, and pushes the old water out…well, most of the old water. There are no screens on the windows because of how few bugs there are. This has been noticed in England, Brussels, Amsterdam, and even the farm country of the Netherlands. Many TV shows are American, but with subtitles and when nobody is visibly talking and it cuts to a new scene, somebody in the native language speaks instead of in English. Heidi and I went to the store to make a meal for Ria, Heidi’s dad’s cousin, who has been taking care of us all week. When we went to the store to purchase the ingredients to make spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad, we found it to be quite difficult. It’s amazing how hard it is to find garlic when they spell it knoflook.

July 4, 2009
We had such a great time in Friesland. On Tuesday we went with Heidi’s dad’s cousin to Veen Park, a recreation of the Friesland area from about 100 years ago. They had old fashioned windmills, bakeries, butcher shops, homes, schools, and churches like they used to be. One of the main jobs all the way into the mid 60’s was harvesting peat. It was used for fuel for furnaces and trains. They would burn it instead of coal. We watched an old peat farmer explain difficulties of harvesting peat. They would make bricks of peat about 4 inches wide, a foot long, and about 4 inches deep. When they would harvest the 4 inches deep they would stomp it down to harder the bricks (using wooden shoes, aka klompen). They would then stack the bricks and dry them for 2 weeks before they could be used for fuel. This stopped when they hit natural gas and used natural gas for fuel instead. Peat wasn’t as efficient as natural gas, and since the Netherlands is pretty much at or below sea level, digging much more than a few feet would cause a danger of flooding in the future.
We also went to Westerborg (probably spelled it wrong). Camp Westerborg was a transportation camp for the Jews during the Holocaust. It was a centralized hub in Holland where the Jews would be transported before sending them to other camps like Aushwitz and Berkenaw. Anne Frank and her family were placed here for a few days until they were sent away.
Wednesday went with Hobbien (Heidi’s grandpa’s sister) and Ger on a boat tour of the canal’s, and a lake that was created by a flood in the land that the peat was harvested. The lake was 1 meter, just about 3 and half feet deep, all the way around, and it was huge. Young teens would jump out of their boats in the middle of the lake and swim beside it, only to easily jump back into their boat. We also ate some pretty amazing, freshly caught ocean fish.
Thursday we went to Gert and Shuart Bijma’s farm (Heidi’s grandpa’s cousin’s sons…whatever that makes them). They worked on the Byma (American name got switched to Byma instead of Bijma) farm when Heidi was 10, for about 3 months. They have a very large farm for the Netherlands. In the Netherlands it’s called a mega-farm when they milk over 250 cows. They milk 250. They are currently building a new rotating milking parlor that can milk 60 cows in 10 minutes at full speed. They were very kind, and it was exciting to see them doing well. We were also to meet both of their wives and Gert’s two children and Shuart’s 3 children.
Friday we took a trip to the sea, the north side of the Netherlands. We went with Gea (Heidi’s second cousin) and Halbe and their two children Yanika (and her boyfriend Peter) and Anette. They all spoke great English, and it was very relaxing to be able be given a tour by them. We went to an ice skating museum, where they had all the original ice skates. Needless to say, they were not very comfortable looking. When it is very cold for a long period of them, 15 days straight of 10 degrees or colder (around…my celcius converter might be a bit off), they have a 200 km race going through 11 cities by way of canal. They announce it 2 days in advance and stop school, business, and everything to have this race. The last one they had was in 1997 and they’ve only had 6 since 1943. You must register every year, regardless if they have the race or not. Each year it costs around $125…and people are on the waiting list. They only take 50,000 applicants, but when they say the race is on, they have two days to get from where they’re at to the start of the race in Leeuwarden. Some people get off of the plane, quickly drive to the start of the race, throw on their skates and start racing…if you ask me, it’s not worth it.
Every day we have had dinner (and usually lunch), transportation, and a place to lay our head at night. It has been great. We have truly been loved this week. We could not thank them enough, and they didn’t even expect the thank you.
Today we’re on our way to Berlin. We activated our Eurail train pass, so we can go anywhere in Europe…except hi-speed trains and night trains for free (except for the price of the pass we already paid). Night and hi-speed trains are a small fee. It is far cheaper for us to go Eurail though, and it’s incredibly easy to use (so far). We’ve been enjoying our train travel through Germany. Well, until next time.
This is Heidi. If you don’t go other places, you don’t often don’t realize the simple things you take for granted. Like ketchup on French fries. I thought that was a given. Here they have fry sauce which apparently tastes like a mayonnaise and mustard mixture. And you have to pay extra if you want ketchup instead. I didn’t try it (TJ did), I am more of a purist when it comes to French fries; ketchup or nothing. Also in the Netherlands, I would ask where the bathroom was and I would get a funny look. It is called the toilet, in houses there are normally 2 separate rooms; a bathroom with a shower/bath and a room with a toilet. I couldn’t remember that for the life of me. I keep on forgetting is that that they call diet coke “cola light”. Also this trip is the first time I have even paid to use the bathroom. You think if you pay for it that it would be clean and smell nice, unfortunately that is not always the case. So we are on the train to Berlin, Germany and we crossed the border between the Netherlands and Germany, and I am whoa disappointed that they didn’t stamp my passport. I could come home with only 1 stamp in it! Oh well, that is way better than have a problem with the passport or ticket 

London, Brussels, Amsterdam, and FRIESLAND

We apologize for the length of time it has been since our last post. We also hope that you can enjoy this post even though it is very long and covers over a week. Enjoy!

London, England
Heidi and I got into London about 11 in the morning London time. We got a day pass to jump on the subway and busses. We tested out McDonald’s…and just as expected, it tasted a little funny. We couldn’t figure out what it was that tasted different, but it did. The diet Coke…or Coca-Cola light tasted a little funny as well. As soon as we got to London we were ready to get to our hotel, and after a few hours of walking around with our back packs we needed some rest. We jumped on the subway and got to the stop close to our hotel. Unfortunately we took a wrong turn when we were walking and ended up about an hour’s walk away.
Our hotel was quite pleasant when we did get there. It was about 30 minutes from downtown London and it was near what appeared to be a national park. It was very woodsy and very quiet. Heidi and I slept well, but decided London was too expensive to stick around and experience. My relatives unfortunately were off to Spain so we had nobody in London to stay with to make it cheaper either. Because of that we decided to start our travel to the Netherlands a little earlier and stayed at a halfway point in Brussels, Belgium.

Brussels, Belgium (Heidi’s first blog writing :))

TJ and I enjoyed Brussels as soon as we arrived, even with the language barrier. TJ can read French, but can’t understand it with how fast and slurred they speak, but that has been helpful with trying to find our way and reading random historical markings. Their subway (Metro) was easy to understand and our hotel was right off the Metro stop, so it was easy to find and we were able to drop our backpacks right away. It is amazing how much more I like walking around a new city without my backpack! We didn’t have anything specific in mind that we wanted to see here, so we wandered around a bit just taking in the sites. But a few things we did see was the “Grand Place” which was the town square with huge old buildings. We also saw the outside of the Royal Palace, a huge sculpture of an atom, walked around a cathedral that took 149 years to build, ate Belgian waffles (which is on the dessert menu) and some Belgian chocolate, tried to find the famous statue of a little boy peeing. I don’t know why it is famous but there are tourist souvenirs of it everywhere. We never did find it. Their signage was quite poor and difficult to follow, but they didn’t even have signs for the peeing boy statue. We assume that it’s because the city isn’t very proud of this statue.

Amersterdam, The Netherlands

We had a little bit of trouble getting to the Netherlands, because we bought train tickets online from a French company (unknowingly), and didn’t know that we needed to get them from different location than the train station. When we arrived at the station we typed in our code in the ticket machine and were told to go to the main desk. After we went to the train company’s desk and waited in line we were informed that we needed to go to the general train ticket desk. We waited in line for many minutes only to find out that we were to go to this separate ticket location. The gentleman gave us gave us an address to get to the French ticket company, but we couldn’t read it. At this point we already missed our train. We couldn’t find it, but after asking around and looking online we found a RAIL EUROPE BENELUX office in a different spot, unfortunately it wasn’t open on Saturdays. Eventually we found the place, they were very kind, gave us tickets for a later train, and we made it to Amsterdam, but it was just a stressful morning. I did enjoy the train ride, to see the canals and windmills as they went by. Everyone has always told me that the Dutch people ride their bike everywhere, but I was still surprised by the massive amounts of bikes everywhere. Ria, one of my (Heidi’s) relatives here, says there are more bikes in the Netherlands than people because most people have 2 bikes, a casual bike and a sport bike. TJ and I went to Anne Frank’s house/museum. It is where she and 7 other people hid for more than 2 years during World War II. The goal of the museum is to show what they went through and to promote tolerance/acceptance of people that are different than you. I really in enjoyed it. TJ thought it was moving as well, that just one girl can do so much for motivating the world around her.
We were there for about 24 hours and then we tried to take a train to the northern part of the Netherlands to see my relatives. We got on our train and at the first stop there was an announcement in Dutch. We thought it was just about what stop it was and didn’t bother to ask anyone what is said since we don’t understand the language… well, unfortunately, we should have. Apparently they split the train there. The front half of the train went one direction and the back half went where we wanted to go. TJ and I were on the front of the train. The conductor told us we were going the wrong way about an hour later. TJ and I got off and found a bus station that would take us back to where we needed to go, but we were an hour and half late. Normally we wouldn’t mind, but my relatives were waiting at the train station for us. They also didn’t know what we looked like. I couldn’t get my cell phone to work because I didn’t know I had to type a “+” before the number, but we eventually made it. Who really would ever think of typing a + anyways. Fortunately, they were happy to see us. They made a sign for us in English that said “welcome Heidie and JR” which was really humorous.
We are staying at a delightful little bungalow of Ria’s friend, and many different relatives are taking TJ and I on little day trips throughout the week, which will be such a blessing. It is a strange feeling to receive gifts of their time and money and know there isn’t a way to pay them back. But I am very thankful.
Day Trip 1 in Friesland (Heidi’s Grandparents Homeland)
Henk and Tien, my (Heidi’s) Grandpa’s sister and brother-in-law took us around to different places from my grandparents’ childhood. We saw where my Beppe (grandma) went to school and where her house used to be. We also saw where my Pake (grandpa) grew up, went to school, his grandparents house (which is still there…and very huge), and also the farm he used to work on before he moved to the United States. We also were taken to a cemetery where my great-relatives are buried. They received the gravesites with the purchase of a piece of farmland, and have a long row of gravesites in the front of a church. They took us back to their apartment, made us a delicious dinner and explained many different types of windmills in the Netherlands. Henk’s hobby is to photograph windmills. He actually wrote a book about windmills of Netherlands, and the book is quite impressive…although it’s in Dutch so we couldn’t read it. They then drove us around to see a few windmills in person, and a huge dam that was built at the tip of the Netherlands to keep the ocean from flooding the Netherlands during big storms. On our way back to the bungalow they took us out to ice cream. They don’t normally speak in English, but they were did a great job at it. The only time they were taught English was in school. Since they are older, it is very impressive that they can remember English that well. TJ is better at communicating with them than I am, because I’m afraid of saying something that doesn’t make sense to them, whereas TJ tries to clarify things. Overall, it was such a wonderful day. We had such a great time with them.