Again taking advantage of our museum memberships and a lovely late September afternoon, we headed off to the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuisen. It’s another outdoor museum, a collection of old buildings and other heritage stuff. You take a boat from the parking lot to the museum and then get to wander around in buildings and such. I can see going back there when the kids are older as there was a lot of cool stuff for them, including dress up clothes so they could look like traditional Dutch children and traditional games.

We tried to time it so Sprocket would sleep in the car on the way there, but of course that didn’t work, so he was increasingly tired and hyper during our visit. And he was most resistant to actually spending any time in the stroller, and at first he was good about wandering around with us, pushing the stroller himself, but then as he got tireder, we had to force him into it just for safety’s (or was it sanity’s) sake. But I can tell a double stroller probably isn’t going to work so well.

For dinner, since Lelystad was on our way home, we’d planned to stop at the vegetarian Chinese place. But Sprocket fell asleep in the car almost as soon as we got in, so we did takeout there instead. Which may in the end have been better – it was still warm and yummy when we got home 40 minutes later, and we got a dinner without a tired toddler.

For photos, click here or below. Not so many this time, but some pretty ones.

How could we not take advantage of the grandparents’ willingness, even eagerness, to take Sprocket for a weekend, his first away from both of us, so we could have a weekend away together? This first time, we planned on just one night of separation to see how it went. I went down with Sprocket on Friday afternoon, in order to spend a little time trying to get the motorbikes going – after many delays and traffic, I didn’t have enough time to do the whole job, just get a picture of what needs to be done, especially with the Honda. Both bikes still need to be officially imported, and the Honda needs to get into selling shape.

DutchBoy was to come down to join us after work on Friday, but train outages kept him in Utrecht for the night and he came down on Saturday morning, to take the lead. You see, I had no idea where we were going. He carefully turned the Garmin away from me so I wouldn’t have an idea, but as we entered the city of Hasselt it became clear. Hasselt is the closest city in Belgium to DutchBoy’s parents, who live fairly close to the border. He wanted to keep it close, just in case Sprocket had any problems, quite smartly. And it’s a cute little town, not really remarkable, but still fun for a weekend. Quite honestly, it doesn’t really matter to us as long as there are a few things to see in a new place.

We headed out to explore, finding a yummy bakery on the way and seeing most of the downtown area and picking up tons of brochures from the tourist info centre. Then back to the hotel to actually move our bags into our room, before heading to the train station to get to Tongeren, a place with supposedly much heritage. Using maps acquired at the tourist info centre, we headed off to find this heritage. Well, I’ll let the pictures tell the story, but the heritage was perhaps a bit overstated. It was a cute place though. Returning to Hasselt, we napped and then headed out for a real live adult dinner in a restaurant, one that didn’t involve appeasing and/or chasing an impatient toddler. Quite lovely to do so, in a green outside patio in a nicish restaurant, though I’d have to say the food was only OK.

Sunday morning we headed to the (free) City Museum before heading off in the car for a jaunt through Belgian Limburgh. We headed first to a museum we’d seen in another tourist publication. Again, advertising was a little overstated, but we enjoyed it since we’d set the Garmin to avoid freeways and I was having fun putting in random routepoints to ensure countryside exploration. After that we headed for a local produce place in another town, again with a randomly rural route. It’s great having the GPS leading us down roads that we’d never dare to assume went through and still getting fairly efficiently to our destination. Then another restaurant meal (mussels and frites, what else?) and back to fetch a tired Sprocket and rescue the tired grandparents.

Click on the picture for photos from the weekend: