Paris and Provence in the spring....2024

 We're off again May 22nd, this year to France: Paris first for five days museum-hopping then  taking the TGV to Avignon/Arles/St. Remy, 8 days in Provence...away we go!

Ok, this was San Francisco 1985

Avignon and Rhone River

After an hour's harrowing cab ride into the city we were deposited at our little hotel on the Left Bank: "Hotel Lantern & Spa"..lanterns being a significant decorating theme and the "spa" I discovered was a tiny pool, gym and steam room in the basement.   I'd recommend the steam room.

        First culture stops after our arrival was the D'Orsay Museum and the Louvre...we were long overdue for some serious art infusions...the D'Orsay is currentlyhosting "Inventing Impressionism, April 1874" showing works from the first of the Impressionist exhibitions that scandalized Parisian culture over 100 years ago.  This exhibition, co-authored by the National Gallery of Art, travels to Washington DC in the fall.  

Chocolates and Mussels in Brussels, oh my. June 2nd-5th, 2023

From The Hague we trainned an hour to Brussels on Tuesday June 2nd.

We had reservations at a first class hotel a block from the Grand Place, "Rocco Forte Hotel Amigo",  a symphony of Spanish design cliches and overly attentive service...the chamber maids insisted on lining up our shoes for us and rearranging our shaving kits in the bathroom... anal but cute.

Upon arrival we immediately headed to the Museum of Fine Arts Tuesday afternoon (Pieter Bruegel, Rubens and Ingres were favorites) and explored the compact over-touristy town center around the Grand Place...500 shops with "THE WORLD'S BEST CHOCOLATES!" or "THE WORLD'S BEST WAFFLES!"  

(See: "Bruges on Sunday" below)

After our Bruges side trip, our Monday final day in Brussels we ventured into the Sablon neighborhood adjoining the Museum of Fine Arts.  It's on the hills dotted with fancy boutiques, cafes and antique shops AND an antique mall where Dan bought an antique porcelain puppy...definitely a carry-on.

                                                                                                 

Brussels Museum of Fine Arts

Regence Chapel, Sablon, Brussels

  

Regence Chapel

Also on the Sablon districts hill overlooking Brussels was a Ferris wheel..."The View"...had to ride.

The View

More View

 

Shadow View

Bruges on Sunday 

An hour’s train ride east of Brussels is medieval Bruges, a lovely canal-filled town and strangely preserved time capsule of the sixteenth century, and something of a Belgian Disney World.  Unfortunately, half of Brussels decided it was a good idea to venture to Bruges at the same day we did... 

on the same train.

We wandered around the town's narrow streets on the sunny Sunday morning and found a few shops open...a notions shop run by two ladies with lovely embroidery tablecloths and runners....AND an Italian restaurant with excellent pizza for lunch!

Working Pizza

   

Working windmill

  

Working Canal rides

The Hague and Delft, the Full Monty Vemeer: "Girl with a Pearl" ..and Vemeer's home Delft...May 30th-June 2nd, 2023

After 5 fun-filled days in Amsterdam, including a side trip to Haarlem, we were ready to move on...and left Tuesday, May 30th for The Hague.  Little did we know that The Hague would be the home of not only a new favorite art museum- the Mauritshuis, but would also rekindle memories of my hitchhiking adventures of 52 years ago (to Madurodam).  The Hague is also where we discovered THE BEST ITALIAN RESTAURANT of the trip..."Bacco per Bacco", we ate there twice. Thank you Rick Steves...and, by the way, I'm completely over being unreasonably jealous of him...even though he HAS spent his life doing exactly what I wish I had done: traveling all over the world and amassing a billion-dollar travel empire of limitless spinoff travel stuff...can you say "Product Line Extension"?  Oh well....

Girl with a Pearl- Vemeer

Downtown The Hague

The Mauritshuis Museum proved to contain quite a large number of gems of Dutch Renaissance and also to be an architectural gem in itself.  Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring", of course, is it's featured masterwork.  that piece was allowed at the Rijksmuseum's Vemeer exhibition for one month, then it returned to The Hague.  It's obviously The Hague's premier artistic attraction. 

Mauritshuis Museum- stillife

Mauritshuis- Rembrandt self-portrait

 
While we were in The Hague, I planned a day trip to Madurodam, the miniature world  Dutch attraction that I visited in 1971when I hitchhiked all over Europe for 6 months.  We took the tram to the suburbs and spent the afternoon walking around the accurate 1/4" scale models of many Dutch landmarks, churches, museums, the Schiphol Airport complete with taxiing planes, a seaport with ships, the famous sea gates designed to block ocean surge from the North Sea...I was in scale model heaven,,,,,could have moved there.

Rijksmuseum at Madurodam
       

Dutch cathedral at Madurodam

Madurodam was originally built in the early 1950s as a memorial to a young Dutch man killed in WWII by the Nazis  The family thought it would be a living legacy to their son.  It has grown over the years to a large park commemorating many famous buildings throughout The Netherlands.  

Delft, Thursday June 1st

It was an easy 20 minute tram ride (#18), from downtown The Hague to Delft, a lovely canal-filled town with the singular distinction of being the birthplace and lifelong home of Johannes Vermeer, the most significant artist of the Dutch Golden Age (18th century) painters.  He was a modest man and lived in quiet obscurity during his short (43 yrs) lifetime, his work became internationally famous only in the 19th century.  We visited the Vermeer center, a townhouse with multi-media presentations of Vemeer's life and times adjoining copies of his works in Amsterdam and The Hague.   Next time we spend at least a night in Delft.

Delft cappuccino 

 

Delft New Church 

Delft tiles-Vemeer center

The Blogger Backstory....What's up with a blog??

 I figured maybe a bit of the backstory perhaps might be in order behind exactly WHY, after all these years and Dan and my many, many travels, do I start a blog now??  After all, in the 40+years Dan and I have been together, we've visited dozens of countries, lived in Italy, for heaven's sake and amassed untold frequent flyer miles but not actually written about our adventures...so why start now?

Good question.  

And the reason is really quite selfish (knowing eye roll from Dan), but I thought a travel blog might be a good way to capture a few brilliant random thoughts and memories from our recent travels...a bit more than the printed travel photo albums that I'm STILL attached to.  I'm a geezeer, I like photo albums, ok?  Besides, my memory ain't what it used to be...not that it was every that great, and I'd like to recall some of this incredible stuff before it disappears completely.   

Anyway, additionally I was prompted to start writing by a dear friend, who shall remain namelesss but I'm sure you'll figure it out who she is.  She mentioned to me as we were recently Facetiming about our most recent European trips.."You should start a blog,"  she casually said.  "You're a good writer" (guilty, he modestly acknowledged), "and you're funny" (guilty, again).  

So I am now attempting to figure out the "Blogger" app.(with partial success).. and this is the Beta-Test!   Please feel free to comment and critique ...I can take it, 😎 he said rather defensively...  

Amsterdam Museum-hopping and Haarlem tilting at Windmills...May 24-29, 2023

 We arrived at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport EARLY Thursday morning May 25th and taxied to our hotel, the Radisson Blu downtown, where we (fortunately) were able to check-in before the 3:00 pm usual check-in time. The Radisson is very centrally located near the train station and just a block from the Red Light district! (As Dan wryly noted).  It also has the best FULL breakfast of our trip, omelettes to order, cappuccino for days...

The first jet lag recovery day was spent walking around town, finding the train station (to book our next destination) and figuring out the city tram system.  I had booked an afternoon canal boat ride online, with "wine & cheese"...on a covered boat in case of rain.  Fortunately, it didn't rain...actually we had gloriously sunny days for two weeks.  But just in case, I didn't fancy us floating around the canals in an open boat in the rain drinking cheap wine.  The ride was nice, covered and uncrowded, the wine & cheese was... not so much.

Covered Boat ride tourists

    

Canal scene

Our first day adventures included a visit to a historic canal house: the Willet House (Herengracht 605), in one of Amsterdam's A+ neighborhoods, elegant 18th &19th century townhouses overlooking Herengracht Canal.  The house was furnished with period pieces (originals had been sold off years ago) to recreate the ambience of domestic living in the city in the 1800s.  We could have moved in.                                                            

Willet House guests

  

 stairwell guardian

 living room

 

Over the next three days our Amsterdam itinerary included the Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum (and the Vermeer exhibition) and Stedelijk Museum... the culture vulture trifecta!  I planned one museum a day (to combat overload fatigue), with a couple side trips to other venues...   

At least that was the plan.  

(See "Full Disclosure" below). 

As mother always said..."If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

And one of my cardinal rules of traveling:  Stay flexible...and enjoy whatever happens.

I had made reservations on line for both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh.  Those were in in short half-hour increments, so plan accordingly when booking!  The Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art is not as well-known as the other two and reservations for that were for all day: "1000 to 1700".  Not so in-demand.

 Besides overdosing on Dutch culture at the museums, we continued our search for good Italian restaurants...forget Dutch herring....we needed pasta.  I had pre-booked a couple restaurants before we left home, top-rated Dutch, they were ok, (except for the gimmicky one where you picked out your fish...I don't wish to look my dinner in the eye), but the ones we found walking around town turned out to be better.  One great Italian restaurant we ate at twice...actually three times if you include expresso one night.  So much for overplanning...

Rijksmuseum tourist

       

Vemeer- Milkmaid

 

Van Gogh- Cornfield with Crows

Friday evening May 26th we had tickets for the symphony, a concert at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, considered one of the most acoustically perfect auditoriums in Europe.  We heard Mahler's 5th to a full house. 

Locals at the Symphony

Night at the Symphony

Haarlem:

After 4 days in (endlessly) tourist-packed Amsterdam, on Sunday we took a 20 minute train ride to the coast for a side trip to the town of Haarlem, home of the Frans Hals Museum, Teyler's Museum, (mansion and oldest museum in The Netherlands), and one significant windmill.  

Haarlem windmill

Haarlem was literally a breath of fresh air...not crowded with tourists on a Sunday morning...actually, we had the town to ourselves until late morning.  This Haarlem windmill was a rebuilt flour mill originally operating in the 1700's.  It burned in the early 20th century and took almost 100 years to be reconstructed to its original hand-crafted specifications. 

We visited the Frans Hals Museum, built in a converted monastery for works by Haarlem's premier artist and also the Teylers Museum, which was in the mansion Teyler lived in in 1784...full of his bizarre collections, dinosaur bones and 18th century scientific experiments, an early acid battery apparatus being one. 

Frans Hals Museum

Teyler Museum collections

We trained back to Amsterdam Sunday afternoon and had one more day of museum-hopping before heading south to The Hague on Tuesday morning.

         On Monday we took in several venues: a few blocks from our hotel was the The Hortus Botanical Garden, (recommended by our horticulturalist friend, Cindy).  Hortus was a lovely small garden in a residential part of town with a two-story greenhouse packed with exotic tropical flora.  

         From the Hortus we visited Rembrandt House & Museum, (where Rembrandt lived and worked for 20+ years until going bankrupt and losing the house and all his valuables).  He conducted art classes on the third floor...talk about the Master's touch.  

         In the afternoon we hopped a tram back to the Museum Plain and visited the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art.  I had purchased online tickets, so no waiting.  The Impressionists (including a couple Van Goghs) were our favorites.

Bride & Groom at Hortus

Not the bride at Hortus

Significant rock in the Hortus

Rembrandt House

Since Dan prefers representational art ... "An apple should look like an APPLE!"  some of the Stedelijk's modern collection was a bit much for him....time to move on...               

    

Metal trash sculpture-  Stedelijk 

Matisse and me at the Stedelijk 

Rembrandt House

Full Disclosure:  We ALMOST missed the Vermeer Exhibition, (the primary reason for the trip), by my misreading the reservation date on the booking....in Europe it's DAY-month-year...so we were booked for a week later than I had planned.  So when we arrived in Brussels the following week, the next morning we caught a train back to Amsterdam to see the Vermeer....whew. 

Spring 2023 The accidental Culture-Vulture Tour

Amsterdam/The Hague/Brussels

Our spring 2023 European trip was supposed to be Croatia.  It was postponed over a year and a half due to Covid...I started the trip planning process in 2019, sketched an itinerary: we'd fly into Split, spend 2 or 3 days there, then a boat ride to Hvar, 2 nights there, return to Split airport, rent a car and drive to Dubrovnik, maybe Kotar for a night....hotels were booked, airline schedules compared, easy peasy.      

Then in early February I happened upon the Arts Section of the Sunday NYTimes and saw a feature spread on a major Johannes Vemeer exhibition that had JUST OPENED at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam....showing until June... the same time we were planning to be in Croatia....a once in a lifetime exhibition of 28 luminous masterworks from the greatest painter of the Dutch Golden Age.  Vemeer's total milieu (as we culture vultures say), consisted of only 33 works completed in his short lifetime (1632-1675).  Timed tickets required...book early....

Ok, so forget Croatia this year and all hands redirect to Amsterdam!  

After confirming the critical availability of our housekeeper/doggie-sitter Tamera, we booked the REVISED spring 2023 European trip for Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels!

..with a few day trips added for good measure.  

We were last in Amsterdam 20+ years ago with Dan's sister Nancy.   I had last visited The Hague 52 YEARS AGO when I hitchhiked all over Europe in Spring/Summer 1971 for 6 months as a 21-year-old college drop-out and soon-to-be Navy enlisted man.  

But that's another story. 

Almost Dutch Master

          

          Frans Hals- Dutch Master