Wooden Shoes and Cheese!

When possible, on Sundays we try to take a bike ride somewhere as a family. Today was a little rainy, but we did it anyway. We rode to a place that makes wooden shoes and cheese in Amstelveen. The website for the place is http://www.claramaria.nl/?lang=en

For the record, I've yet to see anyone in the Netherlands actually wearing wooden shoes (except for the guy that showed us how they make them today)!
The place was only a few kilometers from where we live. It is a 160 year old farm. We were shown how they make wooden shoes. They can also make them completely by hand, but since that is much more time consuming, most of the time they use a couple of machines. The man told us he can make a pair only by hand but it takes about 2 1/2 to 3 hours.



They also make their own cheese. The Dutch word for cheese is kaas. In fact, you can come and help make the cheese sometimes during a weekday in the morning. We are definitely going to come back and do that hopefully sometime soon.



We enjoyed tasting some of the different cheeses and we bought a few different types to take home.



There were a few other American families at the farm/store. They were military families stationed in Germany and were siteseeing in Amsterdam and the surrounding area.

We then headed back toward home and stopped for lunch. I love how everything is so green right now. Also, white asparagus is in season here and I had a salad with it that was very good! I should have taken a picture!



Back at home, our tulips are continuing to bloom. The owner of our house planted these and several additional pots of tulips around our garden before we arrived. So beautiful to have here at home.