Day 161-seeing Holland

The view this morning from our tower room, which is called
"Adelbert." All of the rooms have names rather than numbers.
The kids are playing in the garden that runs around the castle.

   June 13-The reason that we made the trip to Heemskerk was that my father wanted to see the only Case car in Holland.  It is owned by Danny, who lives in Haarlem, which is a dozen miles south of Heemskerk.  My father’s interest in Case tractors moved to Case cars in the late 1990s and now he is very involved with fellow collectors in the U.S.  Thus, it is not entirely surprising that he would attempt to find Case cars in Europe as well.  While on the cruise, he took a day trip to see one in northern Denmark as well.


Danny watches the rest of us inspect his 1912 Case car.

   We drove over to Danny’s, who had pulled the 1912 car out already.  The ladies and Spencer looked at it briefly and then headed off to downtown Haarlem to do some shopping.   Meanwhile, Dad and I headed upstairs to Danny’s apartment for coffee and to look at pictures Dad had brought along and to talk about old cars.  Danny and his friend have restored some rare and amazing cars from the late 19^th and early 20^th century. 


   After a while, he invited us to go for a ride.  He gave us the grand tour of Bloemendaal, which lies to the west of Haarlem and is the most expensive place to live in Holland: we drove by homes that cost over 10 million dollars!  At one point we had to stop and wait for a movie shoot that involved a car driving down the road.  Ironically, the noise from the Case car ruined that shoot, so we headed on down the road and the actors had to reshoot that scene.  Danny also showed us some of the older houses in Bloemendaal, the ruins of a castle, and a traditional Dutch windmill (of course).  It is important to insert “traditional” in the description these days, because there are actually a large number of new electricity generating windmills in the Netherlands and all over northern Germany as well.  We also saw them far out to see to the west of Holland and my folks said that there are many in the North Sea as well. 

   We had dinner with Danny while the ladies and Spencer ate dinner elsewhere and headed to Wormerland, which is northwest of Amsterdam, to see the “old town” street.  They saw a museum that dealt with life from the 1600s to today, a chocolate and biscuit pavilion (how they were made in the 1930s), and a wooden shoe museum.

  

How much more Dutch can you get than these pictures?  The biscuit factory is on the bottom.

   After Dad and I got done eating with Danny, we drove back to his apartment and continued to talk.  He has managed to get his hands on a couple of long garages, so he can actually store multiple cars near his apartment, which is pretty amazing when you consider how tight it is in European cities!  He showed up pictures of some of the other cars they had restored.  It sounded like his pride and joy is the 1909 Knox, which his friend drove from Peking to Paris in 2007 as part of a road rally to commemorate the 1907 road race along the same route.  It sounds like it was quite the adventure. 

   We finally pulled ourselves away and drove out to look at the seashore.  Then we headed to Wormerland to see the same things the rest of the family had seen, not knowing they had headed to the same place as well.  We must have just missed them, though, so when they called us about supper, we thought they were coming out our way from Amsterdam.  We tried to eat at the same place Danny had taken us for dinner, since it was good, authentic Dutch food.  However, the all-important German-Holland game of the Euro 2012 soccer championship was going to start soon, so that restaurant was closing early.  We found another place close by, though, that also had excellent, authentic Dutch food, so we ate our fill and then drove back to our hotels to go to bed.  As we were heading into the hotel, Holland scored and you could hear cheering from all directions.  It seems that every person within earshot was watching the game!

Our hotel, the 13th century castle of Assumburg. We stayed on the second floor in the tower.