We will have our first day on the bus today and will journey from Haarlem to Bacharach, Germany. It is a 6 hour drive but we will stop approximately every 2 hours with our first stop being at Arnhem to spend some time at an open-air museum. We saw an old farmhouse where one third of the house was for the family to live in and the remaining two thirds was for the animals with no walls separating them. They said this was because there was no heat and they used the heat from the animals bodies to help keep their home warm. I imagine the odor was awful. We also saw several windmills used for various jobs, grinding grain, pumping water, etc. We visited an old laundry where they beat the daylights out of their clothes using big wooden devices. We also visited a papermaking place where they took their old rags (those abused clothes, I'm sure!) and made them into paper.
We
had lunch at a Pannenkoeken Cafe located within the grounds of the open-air
museum. Each table of four people shared four pannenkoeken (pancakes),
two sweet and two savory. With full tummies we re-boarded our bus and
headed on to Bacharach.
Our route took us onto the Autobahn where there are no speed limits. Of course, our driver was not allowed to go over 65mph but those around us were flying!!! Zoom, zoom, zoom!!
We arrived in Bacharach and checked into the Hotel Kranenturm. Each room is unique so we all left the doors to our rooms open so that we could check out each others accommodations. Then we met on the porch out front to toast our arrival in Germany.
