Of course one of the first points of order was a trip to visit a very special person indeed, M.r Claus himself!
We visited Hardy’s cottage on a day when a local choir and orchestra were crammed into the tiny living room by the open fire to sing hymns and christmas carols. Greeted with Mulled Wine and cookies we got to explore Hardy’s boyhood home in the most perfect of Yule Tide ambiences.
THREE THOUSAND - TWO THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE CHRIST?!
This fact flawed us and still is just so hard to even comprehend. The biggest of Stonehenge’s stones, known as Sarsens, are up to 30 feet (9 metres) tall and weigh 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) on average! ON AVERAGE!
The smaller stones weigh up to 4 tons on average and were dragged all the way from Wales, just 225 km away!
We were also lucky enough to have visited on Winter Solstace (The shortest day of the year) and so we witnessed part of the Druid's ceremony.
Amsterdam is an amazing city, the perfect place to walk, walk and walk some more. The canals are awesome, lined with lovely old houses, museums, bars and cafes. The city is vibrant, but not too busy, clean and fully geared towards healthy living and sustainable energy. The highlight of the trip was meeting up with friends and of course the amazing Anne Frank House museum. The girls were totally in awe of Anne as they had both read the Anne Frank Usborne book (read Kaitlyn’s review here) and had also seen one of the many movies dedicated to her. The Museum did not disappoint! At Anne’s father’s wishes it had been left empty, without furniture and had been sophistically appointed with pictures and snippets of information throughout, so as to give the visitor glimpses into the awful years that were spent here whilst in hiding. Moving, to say the least.