Holiday 2017, day 9 : Bordeaux

Today we visited the city of Bordeaux. We parked outside the city centre so we started our journey in the suburbs. To get to the centre we walked through a market / food court.

Even the suburbs look nice here.

Then we saw the Basilique Saint-Michel. Pretty cool building considering the tower is seperate from the rest of the building.

Very nice square around it as well with a little book market.

We stopped here (Moony) for lunch, very nice place, can recommend a meal here!

It's a burger bar and they've got some real nice one too!

It was getting pretty hot outside eventhough the forecast said "cloudy"....
This is the Pont de Pierre crossing the Garonne river.

The banks of the Garonne in Bordeaux. The river itself was big but the water very muddy.

Another Bordeaux landmark: Porte Cailhau.

And then this "must see". It's "Le Miroir d'eau", mirror of water. Very nice place with lots of people enjoying a refreshing stroll in the few centimeters of water.

At first I was wondering why they call it a mirror...

But every so often the water level drops, leaving wet stones behnd and then....

Selfie time!

After a while the water comes back slowly but because the stones have warmed up this creates a lot of steam which in turn is another awesome thing about this "mirror of water" :-)

Walking on.... we came across the coolest icecream shop in Bordeaux. They make the icecream look like a flower! Oh, and you can get a macaron on top!

Of course there had to be some shopping involved too.

Milan and I thought the LEGO store was quite fascinating :-)

And then we walked back to our car.

I can conclude that Bordeaux is very much worth a visit and definitely a city I could live in!

The bike ride

Simone and I went for a bike ride this evening. The weather was really nice.

The ride mainly went through fields, some with cows :-)

The sun had 2 sun dogs or parhelia.

Us :-)

We had a chat with a group of cows.

The half-way point of our trip was a little town called Ilpendam.

Windmill.

The ride was lovely and I think we'll do it again.

The beach lunch

Today we wanted to do something nice so we drove to Bergen aan Zee for a lunch at the beach.

The weather was great and so was our lunch.

Back home we had to walk the folders. I saw this mother duck with 8 ducklings in their puberty ;-)

More snow!

Quite a bit of snow fell over night. This doesn't happen very often so i was really keen on going for an early walk this morning and Simone came with me.

Someone made a little snowman :-)

Duofie!

We made our own snowman. I hope it will stand there for a while.

We are experimenting with letting Silver out at the back. It's a bit scary as he tends to try and get in the neighbour's gardens and then we can't look after him anymore. It is about time we learn to let go though.

Silver is a cat-boy and he loves it outside so I think we should let him.

Merry Christmas!

This Christmas day we met my parents for brunch in a hotel in between Alkmaar and Amsterdam.

Everybody got a free hat.

My dad and my mom.

The place was packed but the buffet was pretty good! There was live music too, which was nice.

The castle / Scheveningen pier.

This is the coach house behind which our hotel is. The hotel breakfast/dinner-room is here. Very nice building.

After a nice breakfast we went for a walk around the castle grounds.

Lots of mushrooms everywhere.

Duckies still sleeping.

The castle from another angle. Pretty nice.

A runner came by and offered to take a piccie of us. Worked out pretty well I think :-)

More mushrooms.

At 11 o'clock our host from the hotel gave us (and other guests) a tour of the castle which was really nice!

There was a bigger group than he thought but it went very well. Here we are standing in the room where we had dinner the night before.

Nice.

...

There are two sphynxes here. One of them was taken by famous Dutch writer Jan Wolkers a long time ago when the castle was abandoned. He also tried to take the other one later but had to leave it in the forrest because he had to assist his mate carry out a 3 metre tall mirror. That sphynx was never found again. The people who restored to the castle to its current glory managed to retrieve the one sphynx from his sister and had a mirrored image made so now it's in one piece again.

After the tour we drove to Scheveningen. The views were nice but the pier itself wasn't very apealing to me personally. Skip.

There's a big ferris wheel....

And you can bungy jump. Not for me.

Then we went home to get huggies from Silver :-)