This past Saturday we went on a little Holland adventure with our friends, the Rasmussens. We drove 90 minutes to the village of Giethoorn, which is known in the Netherlands as "Venice of the North", because there aren't many roads in Giethoorn and to get around you have to navigate through the canals. As I was talking to Rachel Saturday morning about what we were going to do, she quickly asked if a pirate was going to be on the boat. I guess she gets that from her Dora show... :)
Once we arrived in Giethoorn we enjoyed a picnic lunch and then rented out a "whisper boat" (quiet motor boat) for two hours. We all laughed as we were boarding the boat because life jackets were not provided - not something that would fly in the U.S. Anyhow, here are some pictures of our adventure on our little motor boat as we toured through the town of Giethoorn:
Audrey was so happy the whole boat ride. She enjoyed being held and playing on the floor of the boat as well.
Rachel and Talynn enjoying the view. Rachel was so sweet to share her sunglasses with Talynn. :)
We came across, what we assumed, were some wedding boats docked by a church:
About halfway through our boat ride we emptied out into a lake.
And what more could we ask for - a boat ice cream stand! :) We all enjoyed some ice cream and Jon did a fabulous job of guiding our boat to the side of the ice cream boat.
After our boating adventure in Giethoorn we drove about 20 minutes to the town of Staphorst, which is famous for people wearing traditional Dutch dress. We've been to another town that claimed this in the past, so I wasn't very hopeful. But this time Staphorst pulled through. We saw several women and one man dressed in traditional dress. While we were driving through Staphorst we accidentally happened upon a demolition derby. We decided to go investigate and lucky for us it was almost over, so we got in for free. We definitely felt a bit out of place, but the kids enjoyed it. We discovered that red necks do exist in Holland. Instead of cowboy boots they wear wooden shoes:
We were a little out of place since we weren't smoking, wearing filthy jeans, sporting some wooden shoes, enjoying a Heineken, and sending our children around to collect empty glass beer bottles to recycle. But, we did enjoy ourselves. I think the adults enjoyed people watching and the kids enjoyed watching the cars go "crash-bang" (as Rachel would put it).
Staphorst was a very quaint town. It reminded me of a very strict HOA. All of the houses were built out of the same color brick and all the shutters were painted green. Each and every house was angled at a diagonal to the street. We enjoyed driving around Staphorst and here's one of the many houses that all look the same:
A perfect ending to a fun Dutch day was dining at a Pancake House. 
While we were enjoying our dinner we saw several tractors pulling cars from the demolition derby:
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