2nd Pentecost Day

It's been funny to see the Dutch approach to holidays. There's 2nd Christmas day, 2nd Easter day, and even 2nd Pentecost day. It's easily explained by the fact that those holidays often fall on Sunday, and the Dutch want to benefit from a holiday with a day off. My guess is that most American's don't even know what Pentecost is, let alone demand a day off work for the 2nd day of that holiday. (FYI, it's the day that the Holy Ghost was sent after Christ's death for the apostles). With 2nd Pentecost (PC) day being a national holiday, the whole family had a day off. This doesn't happen often, not counting Saturdays when Joe usually has to study most of the day.

Instead of just hanging around the house and wasting the day away, we (me) found some interesting things to do. Holland used 2nd PC day as the official national "Castle day". Many castles planned festivals with middle age settings, knights, horse races etc. Unfortunately the weather was being it's typical self, and wet. We opted to check out one such castle, and have the backup plan of visiting a museum. (glad I had the backup plan) As a few dressed up men did mock sword fighting, the slow and steady rain kept coming. My quest to explain that this would have happened in the middle ages as well, didn't work too well. The kids were very pleased when the sword fighting ended, and we could check out the inside of the castle. It was a lot smaller than they expected, and they were a bit disappointed about the lack of grander. They've seen one too many movie about "real" castles.

The small castle didn't provide too much entertainment, so we headed for the backup plan.
No day is complete until Sterling drops a shoe in the water. But don't worry, Joe "can fix anything" A shoe in the water? No problem! He's just climb over the railing and dangle himself upside down of the bridge
Naturalis is a museum of natural history, where the kids did a treasure hunt.