| Valkkoog, October 2016 |
My trips to the Netherlands are not complete without a visit to my sister and brother-in-law in Valkkoog. This time it was only a short stay with beautiful autumn weather. They have many fruit trees in their garden, lots of apples and pears in this time of the year.
For our dinner Arend had prepared "hete bliksem", a traditional Dutch dish with potatoes, apples and meat. I had not tasted it in many decades, it was delicious.
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 Autumn atmosphere in the garden
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 The orchard
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 Pear tree
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 Delicious pears
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 Dinner
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 Hete Bliksem
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During my visit the yearly Kunst10daagse took place in Bergen, the famous artist village, not far from Valkkoog. During a period of ten days, more than 200 artists have temporary exhibitions of their work all over the village.
I had visited Bergen several times in the past for its architecture. In the period 1915-1918 a number of villas was built here in the style of the Amsterdamse School. Beautiful villas in Park Meerwijk.
 Villa Meerhoek (1917-1918)
Architect C.J. Blaauw
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 Villa's Meezennest en Meerlhuis (1915-1918)
Architect Margaret Staal-Kropholler
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 Beek en Bosch (1915-1918)
Architect C.J. Blaauw
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We walked around this part of Bergen and had a look at several of the exhibitions. I only took a few pictures of art works that really appealed to me. Of course there was much, much more.
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My sister is an (amateur) artist herself, during our walk she met several colleagues and of course she was interested in the various techniques, that were demonstrated.
We ended our Bergen visit with a nice lunch.
 Two artists
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 Watching how she is working
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 Artist in action
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 Lunch in Bergen
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Preparing our trip to the Netherlands, Aric had discovered an interesting website, the Atlas Obscura, a huge collection of , often unknown, Points of Interest all over the world. We had studied the Dutch collection and visited a few of them, for example the Moses Bridge, see my Zeeland blog. One of them we found very intriguing: the Kremlin of the Netherlands. It turned out that this POI was also located not very far from Valkkoog, in a small village called Winkel, so we decided to visit it in the afternoon.
This Kremlin of the Netherlands is a garden of monumental folly's, constructed during the past decades by Ger Leegwater, a retired metal welder, a real labour of love.
We were lucky! Opening times are a bit irregular and often only on appoinment. When we arrived, a group of visitors was being guided around by the owner, and his friendly wife allowed us to walk around on our own.
You can not believe your eyes when you see it...:-)
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The folly's are made of scrap material, collected by Leegwater, and shaped into fanciful creations. It's a work in progress, the two statues of Orpheus and Bacchus are recent and he is now working on a campanile. What an amazing man!
And what a nice day.
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 Orpheus
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 Bacchus
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 Under construction
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 The building materials
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