On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Captain C
Last September, I had the joy of going to the Netherlands for a family reunion, descendants of my mother’s opa. The reunion took place in The Hague and Rotterdam, as the latter is where the USA and Canadian branches of the family emigrated from, was attended by 35 or so people. It was a wonderful three days of meeting people, seeing people I haven’t seen in awhile, and amazingly there was no drama.
Afterwards, I spent four days in Amsterdam, including a very enjoyable day with my sister which involved cookies, poffertjes, the Van Gogh Museum, and our mother and her family’s house back when they lived in Amsterdam over seven decades ago.
This set takes place from the start of my journey in Brooklyn to The Hague and a little beyond…
Heading towards the airport…
A courtyard near my hotel.
Looking out my window on Sunday morning.
I’m not going to post photos of my various relatives seeing as how they’re alive, but these are my great grandparents who have been gone longer than I’ve been alive, so it’s probably OK. Everyone at the reunion was descended from them or partnered with such. One couple, I attended their wedding when I was 6 and the groom still remembered that I proudly brought my brand new Darth Vader action figure to the festivities.
My great grandfather was a minister, who was said to have founded a new church with the portion of his congregation who thought the old one was not strict enough. My great grandmother was a very smart woman who, had she been born a couple generations later, probably would have run her own company or other such complicated enterprise.
Local Doritos flavor.
A tram near our hotel. My sister who doesn’t live in NYC had some serious transit envy in the Netherlands.
Heading to Rotterdam by subway(!) to the next part of the reunion, a harbor tour and lunch at the hotel where our ancestors stayed (and also some of those present) when they departed the Netherlands!
(The actual pic is just something that looked cool.)
Baud
I expected Den Haag to look more prisony.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Baud: I think it literally means “the hedge” (not sure why). I know you are referring to the international court, but I always think of the Hague primarily as having the wonderful Mauritshuis art museum, with The Goldfinch and Vermeer’s View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring
stinger
Subway (!) indeed!
JeanneT
I’m looking forward to part 2!
MCat
Thanks for sharing your trip with us. Love the Netherlands.
Steve in the ATL
Ah, the old “I’m on trial at the Hague for war crimes but I’m telling people it’s a family reunion” ruse!
MelissaM
My BIL lives in Den Haag! It’s where I imagine we would retire from this sinkhole of a country if The Netherlands would take us, and if we didn’t have adult kids trying to make their lives in the sinkhole.
eclare
So cool ranch=cool American. Sounds about right.
Torrey
My sympathies to your great-grandmother. On the other hand, she does look like she could drill a hole straight through you with her eyes if you showed up in a slightly too fancy dress for church. And yes, she does look like she could have run a very substantial organization. It’s always interesting to see pictures of people from a few generations back and learn something about what they were like.
Do you have any information about the church split in question?
Thank you for sharing these pictures with us.
montanareddog
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Den Haag is the short form but the correct name of the city is ‘s-Gravenhage.
A Graf is the Dutch equivalent of an Earl or a Count and ‘s-Gravenhage means the Count’s hunting land (you are right about haag meaning hedge but here it a synonym for closed lands)
Another Dutch city, Den Bosch, is abbreviated from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which means Duke’s Forest. Why these two cities, both with names derived from aristocratic hunting grounds, are abbreviated that way is an interesting question since they are the only two I can think of like that.
Mike in Pasadena
Dmkingto
@Steve in the ATL: lol
ruckus
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I think about it this way. The US is a much larger country, even as it is split into 50 states and so we often think about states or possibly 2 or 3 states together when we think of what the US is like. And parts of this country are far different than others. I got to travel a lot of this country and even some others for a job I once had for a decade and I saw a lot of countries along the Atlantic (both sides, top to bottom) while in the USN. Segments of this country, likely because it is rather large can be far different from others. Even the 2 coasts are different, we have a state that gets a lot colder than most in the main segment, we have an island state in the Pacific. Many of the parts of this country are quite different in many ways, from the islands to the deserts to the mountains to the farmlands. It’s a big chunk of land and more than a few humans live here. I was fortunate enough to have a job at one point, where I traveled to most every state, I’ve lived on both coasts and in the middle. This is a large country, with many areas that can strike one as far different from other areas, because they are. It’s one of the things that make it what it is. Most of the people that live here have family histories from other lands, parts of said histories can be quite a bit different, even in small groups. Now a lot of the citizens of today were born here but many people in the generation prior to mine were immigrants. Many people have prior generations that came here from elsewhere, many of them not all that many generations back. I’m only second generation born in the US in my family. And even in that we have my father, born in the eastern half and brought to California in a horse drawn wagon at one year old, over dirt roads. This is a country of immigrants, much of the prior 2 or 3 generations back were immigrants. I’m an old and have seen a massive amount of change over my lifetime. It’s an interesting place, with many like me, not all that far removed from our immigrate past. Many not as far back as I am.
Captain C
@Baud: I stayed in one of the non-prisony districts.
Captain C
@Steve in the ATL: Shhhhh!!! They still believe the cover story.
Captain C
@MelissaM: Retiring there is definitely something I’m thinking about, if I can find a way to pull it off and bring Dame N with me.
Captain C
@Torrey:
Unfortunately not really more than I wrote in the caption (other than that they were both Protestant churches, probably Dutch Reform). I do know that my Opa had a plaque made for the church commemorating his father’s founding of it; I’m not even sure what town it’s in (I can ask some relatives). I would imagine it was over some differences in doctrine that would seem almost invisible to outsiders.
Mokum
@Captain C: see for instance en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Churches_in_the_Netherlands_(Liberated)
This was while the Endlösung was in full swing. My ancestors told the story that the point of discussion was whether the Snake literally spoke to Eve in paradise or not. This seems not to be true, but they would not know, being heathens since the 19th century. But families broke apart over this dispute, brothers and sisters not longer talking to each other. On the other hand of the few Jews that survived in the Netherlands many were rescued by very orthodox calvinists. They were opinionated and nobody could tell them what to do.