A weekend in Holland...

G´day,

And a special welcome to my congregation, Hi Emily, Josara, Julia, Cord, Daniel, Andrew, Scott, Bill and Jan. Today´s blog entry will be a bit more on the photo side as I took some pictures last weekend when I visited Josara´s parents in Sleen.
Sleen is in Holland´s country side and it´s a really picturesque village...
Sleen village entrance...
inside Sleen...typical Dutch street pavement...they have too many bricks and don´t know what to do with them, so the Dutch cover their streets with bricks...
Nice house...
more nices houses...very Dutch...I really like the thatched roofs...
more beautiful Sleen...
Yeah, Sleen really is picturesque...
even the church...
...and the graveyard...
more old farmhouses...
Josara´s parents house...
...has a beautiful garden...
...and an old stable...
...with goats...
...and a tractor from the 50ies which is the pride of Josara´s dad (more on that later)...
The garden really is beautiful...
From left to right, Jan, Jan and Thea...

After dinner Jan decided that he could trust me enough to let me take the tractor for a ride around the village...and the first thing I learned was that a tractor has more pedals than I was used to. But once you know which pedal to push it was quite easy to get the tractor to move forward...
...forward is easy but finding the break proved to be a little more of a challenge...
...still looking for it...but luckyly nothing was in the way...it would have been a nice start for the relationship to the parents of my girlfriend to drive her Dad´s tractor into their living room...
but in the end I got the hang of breaking and we took a nice ride around Sleen. Riding a tractor is definetly fun but a little on the loud and bumpy side. For some reason the Monster Magnet song "Ridin´the tractor on a dope farm..." came into my head but as Holland can be considered the dope farm of Europe that was explainable.

Afterwards we spend a great evening, even though Josara´s parents comitted a war crime in the war of sexes which is banned by international treaty, they showed me the children pictures of Josara without her being there to censor the worst bits...highly entertaining...we had a fun night...

The next morning Jan and me went to see the Hunebeds in the area. Those are ancient burrial sides made of stone. Very archeological area to grow up in, now I know why Josara became an archeologist.
At that size of rocks even I can tell "Jup, that´s probably an artefact..."
That´s a stylish graveside...
Well, when I´m dead I want something like that...
...and of course no visit to the Dutch countryside would be complete without a windmill...
It was a really great weekend and I´m already looking forward to come back again...

As I said, this entry will be a little on the picture side, so I´l leave it at this and wish you a good one, have fun, take care and cya