Life: Idiotropic

Wednesday we headed over to the Sittard market to buy cheese and white asparagus (spargel or asperges) and look around, then I took Dad and Angie to the Rousseau chocolate shop and the Dutch Thrift Shop, Bis Bis. Afterwards we went to Kasteel Hoensbroek and toured it. The Dutch castle is one of the prettiest, I think, in the area surrounded by a nice lake and beautiful trees. It's a pretty popular castle and promotes itself by hosting parties and a lot of other events. One little girl was having a birthday party there, so she and her friends were all dressed up in traditional medieval type dresses.


The great thing about this castle is that you can tour a lot of it. Many castles are either closed completely to tours inside or the tours are led by guides and extremely controlled. When we toured the Burg Eltz we only got to go into a very small portion of the castle. This one is not completely opened, but most of it is, so we really saw a lot and given that it was a self-guided tour, it was a lot more fun to look around. We crossed a drawbridge over a moat to go through the large doorway into the courtyard. It was a nice open area and both Arianna and Luci enjoyed sticking their arms and necks in the stocks to pretend they were "in jail." We were hungry, so we had a snack the cafe down below the courtyard. It was a stone room - arches of stone, ceiling and floor of stone - dark, but interesting. After our snack we started our tour by going up into the 60 meter tall tower. It was amazing because they actually let you go all the way up to the top. The rooms were small and the stairways were very windy and very narrow with very little headroom. We did a lot of ducking and stooping. The kids loved the stairs. From the last room we took steep ladders up the rest of the way and got to look out the tiny little windows. The pictures below were taken from the tower windows.

This castle was built in 1250 and remained in the Hoensbroek family until just 100 years ago. Now it's redone and very nice. The rooms inside show how they lived. The beds are small and in the office there are animal heads and horns all over the wall. The bathrooms were interesting and probably Arianna and Luci's favorite attraction along the tour. They are small one-skinny-person sized stools built into the wall - on an outside wall. You lift a lid that covers a hole and sit. The hole is just that - a hole - through which you can look down and see the moat below. Potty training must have been scary! And how embarrassing to be using "the facilities" at the top of the tower or anywhere else for that matter when all your incoming visitors can see and smell exactly what's going on. Oh, the joys of modern plumbing! Oh, and in the kitchen, there was a little slant by the wall and a hole to the outside where you can sweep your floor and get rid of the gross stuff - right into the moat!

We saw all of the castle except for the dungeon which we sadly missed. Next time I'll go there. It would be fun to see. The basement in one wing is full of games for kids and visitors. It is obvious that they do a lot of events and festivals there with different activities for the kids. Arianna and Luci enjoyed "modeling" the wooden cutouts of old clothes.


Here are my dad and I standing in front of the part of the castle that we were able to tour. That biggest tower on the right is the one we were in - almost up to the very top! The water goes right up to the walls of the castle too which seems like it would be hard to keep it structurally sound. These guys were fishing in the moat at the castle. So far all the Dutch fishermen that I've seen have these rediculously long fishing rods. They're at least twice the length of anything I've ever seen.