Travels: Ruurlo, The Netherlands

This summer vacation I could only get one week of days off, due to lack of human recourses at my job (which is in the OR, I'm a scrub and circulation nurse) and this week happened to be last week. As usual for the last past years we planned a holiday in our own country because I just can't stand the heat around the Mediterranean nowadays. This time we went to Ruurlo, a small town near the border with Germany. 

Although a small town there were enough attractions and activities in the neighborhood to easily fill a week.  

Some of the things we did were:

Visiting the Cactus Oase. Of course this was something my daughter really, really wanted to do. The so called 'Cactus Oase Arrangement' came with paiting a little plant pot for a later to choose cactus and a Cactus Quest. 

 

We also visited Zutphen, a so called 'hanzestadje' (Hanze being a treaty between Dutch and German cities to  work together and by this protecting their commerce). The city has lots of beautiful buildings. Unfortunately the day we visited there was also a fair standing in front of most buildings, so pictures are limited. 

The town of Ruurlo itself has a beautiful castle. We didn't go in, because in it is a museum with paintings nowadays. I'm not a big fan of museums with paintings. For some reason it really tires me to watch an uninterrupted stream of paintings. I prefer to watch paintings per three or four. 

  When I was a child a really thrilling TV series that was recorded in this castle, so I would have love to go inside. I looked it up on YouTube and all episodes are online, so before we went to visit the castle we watched all of them, so my daughters would feel the same excitement as I. The great thing was that the actually were excited and found the series as thrilling as I did when I was young. I still found it thrilling, indeed, as I watched together with my daughthers. 

Around Ruurlo are lovely forests, so of course we did some walking and cycling. I was really pleased to see that Fall is in the air, because Fall is my absolute favorite time of year!