📸 — Heemskerk, Volendam & Monnickendam, Netherlands.

Our last stop on our Netherlands adventure was in Heemskerk to visit some of Maeghan’s family.

Rob is Maeghan’s mom’s cousin. He let us stay with him and took the time off of work to show us all over Northern Holland.

It was the best way to end our time there and here are some of the highlights of our time.

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Stopped by the beach and walked the boardwalk. Its still funny to picture Holland with such pretty white sand!

20+ degrees every day during the 3 weeks we visited.. we’re convinced Holland has the best fall weather!

Rob, Maeghan and Oli!

Passing by and looking at the new windmills vs. old ones.

We went to Volendam to check out the tiny fisherman village and windmills. Maeghan got distracted by the big shoes.

There used to be over 1,000 windmills in this area! Now they have 5 that are still standing but all functioning and producing various products.

These are wedding clogs.

Sunday clogs and Persian clogs.

But the glitter clogs are definitely a Maeghan type clog.

They make them while the wood is wet and you can actually blow on the toe of them while they are being shaped and a ton of water will spew out.

The fisherman villages has some houses along the canal with people who actually live there. In the middle of the open-air museum.

Maeghan’s Oma and Opas both have dutch clocks. It was cool to see how they evolved with various improvements to the clock building process.

Think about it — a pocket watch when they first came could probably had the same hype as the iPhone did back in the day.

Windmills for flour, windmills for sawing, windmills for chocolate!

Walking path and the biking path.

As the windmills turn, it uses a crank shaft and turns gears that then move the saw blades up and down to saw the wood faster than any group of men could at that time. The massive log also gets pushed until the saw blades automatically by the windmill. The complexity of the engineering is quite impressive for the time where it was invented.

The wood would sit in the water for a year and soak to relax the wood and remain better in tact during the cutting process.

Next — cheese time!

Young cheese is aged for 6 months and old cheese is aged typically to one year. It sits in salt water and than waxed for better storage.

Some of the cheese we tried!

We enjoyed dinner and talking about our travels around the world. We also had the best dessert that I loved so much I didn’t take a picture! It’s drained yogurt, with sugar and berries!

A clog boat tied to a bus. What a sight!

This is a weird photo.. but i just want to remember that while you drive you pass acres and acres of farm land that is flat, green and only separated by canals so it feels like all the animals roam free as you see no fences.

Stopping in Monnickendam for a visit.

Maeghan ordered a iced coffee expecting a black coffee on ice.. but instead got this gem of a drink with ice cream, cookies and a TON of whipped cream!

After a long day… Oli passed out on the car ride home.

The next day we did a real cheese tour and got to learn the process of how the cheese is made as well as cheer on their corporate video they were shooting.

More fun cheese was had!

And Maeghan saw clogs, so she had to take another picture.

After the tour, we went out back to meet the Jersey cows who make all this cheese!

After a calf passes its baby stage, it is then called a “pink”. So all these Pink cows were feasting on some grass and hanging out with us by their barn.

Checking out more fisherman villages in the area — the houses are SO cute and they all look generally the same.

This is the fresh water lake that was made from canals!

We did a photo shoot — both Maeghan’s Oma’s have pictures dressed up like this so we decided to do one as well!

Doggo watching us pass by.

Always eating ice cream! This was a liquorice one!

We hadn’t cooked in a while so took the lead on making beef stir-fry for dinner.

The next day we went for a run (its been a while since our last one!) and Heemskerk is covered in farmland.

We ran by this lovely horse on our morning run and also had the sweetest exchange with a farmer who spoke no english — but kept speaking dutch until Maeghan understood him. She doesn’t speak dutch, but kind of can navigate through it. But we chatted for a bit about the great weather, his garden, mentioned where we were from and then went back on our way. :)

The leaves are all changing colours and its beautiful.

Then our last night we went to visit Maeghan’s Oma’s little sister. It is crazy how much they look alike and it was really cool to hear stories about Maeghan’s grandparents and how they lived in Indonesia, the Netherlands and when they first moved to Canada.

After a very short night, we made our way to the airport to wrap up our last 30 days in the UK! Oli was not stoked on the early morning flight so tried to sleep in the lounge.

See more on our website www.alittledetour.ca🌏✈️👫