Today we had another excursion. This time we went to Het Loo and Kroller-Muller. These places are hard to get to by public transportation and because there are so few of us, we took a car to Apeldoorn. Kyler went to a concert last night and was unable to make it back in time for our trip, so he didn’t go. We rented a very nice vehicle and Steef drove. It took about two hours to get to Het Loo. The roads were very busy and we had to slow down or stop many times. We drove through one of the Netherland’s national parks. It was fun to see. We saw the “Dutch Mountains” which were smaller than the hills in Iowa! There were many trees and sort of reminded me of parks at home.
Our first stop was Het Loo which translates to “Palace in the Woods.” Het Loo was built between 1684 and 1686. It has been renovated numerous times since. The royal family lived here until Queen Wilhelmina passed away in 1962. It has been a museum since 1984. Unfortunately, we could not take pictures inside the palace. It was highly decorated and very interesting to see. There was also a very large garden that was nice to walk through.
After Het Loo, we went to Kroller-Muller. This park area once belonged to the Kroller-Muller family. It was at one time their hunting grounds. Today, it is a park and the home to the Kroller-Muller museum. When we first got to the park, we had lunch since it was 1:30. We were given 10 Euros for lunch money. The food was expensive so I used all of my money easily.
After lunch we went to the Kroller-Muller museum. Mrs. Kroller-Muller loved art and collected it. The museum is home to the second largest collection of Van Gogh paintings. She was one of the first to buy his works when his family began selling them. She also collected paintings by Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, and many others. I enjoyed looking at the paintings.
The museum also has a large sculpture garden. It was another beautiful day and we walked around the paths for awhile. Some of the sculptures were nice to look at, but many of them were quite strange. After we had seen most of the sculptures, we decided to bike around the park. We went to what Dennis called the Dutch desert. It was an area where there was just a lot of sand. We then biked to the Kroller-Muller’s hunting lodge. It didn’t really look like a hunting lodge to me but it was interesting to see.
Around 5:00, we got back in the car and drove back to Leiden. The traffic was terrible in a few places. But, it didn’t slow us down too much.
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