Day 8

Off we went in the mega-van again, this time we drove south to Maastricht. Our first stop was the home of one of our most favourite people, Andre Rieu! Unfortunately he was in Canada when we came by, so we could only take pictures of his lovely house and gardens! Maybe if we go to Holland again sometime, we’ll have a chance to meet, seeing that we are his greatest fans, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind!

Andre's House

Very pretty gardens

Just around the corner from Andre (pretty much anyway) were the caves of Maastricht (sorry about the link for our "english only" readers, I tried to find one, but all I could come up with was the Dutch site!) We first had a coffee in the restaurant, and then went for a little walk around the area. I made a quick stop at the local playground. That was the last time I enjoyed any sort of playground equipment. You may have thought that I learned my lesson two days ago with my terrifying experience on the ‘spinner’ ride in Germany, that I would stay away from any and all kid’s toys in general. But, I figured that a teeter-tooter would surely be a safe and fun place to play on. Well, this final experience will keep me away from these places for a while. Bianca and I innocently jumped on, smiling, enjoying the ride until the ‘incident’. You see, there was a tire underneath both ends, so that you don’t ‘bump’ off the ground, its a little more ‘cushiony’ to bounce off the tire. Well, probably due to the fact that I was about 20 years too old to be on this thing, and a little too big, I paid the price – my butt was lodged (pinched) between the tire and the teeter-totter. OUCH! As I tenderly walked away (probably ran actually), I realized that this was the end of my playground experiences in Holland. I wasn’t going to take my chances with any other possible ‘wounds’ or ‘nausea’ anymore. (Sorry no pictures of the welt)

Entrance park to the Caves of Maastricht

Just micro-seconds before the "incident" :(

After our little walk around, we were ready to go on the tour of these Limestone caves. Our guide was absolutely fantastic! He spoke English (as that was what the majority of us spoke); he was very witty and had lots of interesting information about the caves. This underground world was built by human hands. There are over 200,000 passageways covering a total of 200km in these caves. Maybe that’s why we had a guide ;) We were able to walk in complete darkness, one hand on the person in front of us, the other on the wall beside us and made our way around a corner in the dark (although, someone in the tour group did cheat…he used his cell phone light to see a little), the few seconds that we did have in the pitch black gave a us a good sense of how dark it really is in the caves! They used these caves during the Second World War as shelter during the heavy fighting – they actually made wells, a chapel, a bakery and some kind of hospital ward down there too.

Entrance to the caves

Our source of light in the caves

Archways in the caves

Carvings

A whole wall of drawings

Religious altar

Really neat drawing of prehistoric animals, the picture was huge!

Another religious drawing (there were a lot of them)

After the cave tour, we walked around Maastricht for a little while, then left to go to the Margraten American War Cemetery. This cemetery has over 8,000 gravestones – all in the shape of crosses, and put at a slight angle to make the rows curve. Unfortunately, when we got there, they were just closing the cemetery, so we didn’t get a chance to walk around. But, we pulled ahead a bit on the road and found an area to park and walked thru a farmer’s field to get to the outside of the cemetery. We could see a bit of it, so I suppose that we could say that we did visit the cemetery…just not thru the right doors!

Various views of the cemetery from the farmer's field

Just a random shot of Alvar walking back to the van

**By the way, I incorrectly posted our Belgium visit/meal on Monday’s blog entry. It was actually today that we went there. I suppose I just tied it to the wrong traumatic playground incident with the wrong day!!**