Day Sixteen: The Netherlands

After a late night, we woke up at 10:00 and had breakfast with janina and stefan. The kids jonte and rone were already at school so the house was very quiet. 

First we drove to see an old monastery called Kloster Hude ( Hude Monastery). It was built in 1232 as a daughter house of Mariental Monastery. It stayed strong for over 250 years, producing bricks, woven goods and pottery ( i found two pieces in the rubble) until its downfall in 1536 due to the reformation. It fell into a state of disrepair, and the roof and many of the walls collapsed. The leftover bricks, stones and wood slowly was turned back into dirt and now "ground level" in and around the monastery is actually around 6 ft higher than it was back in the day. 

Wild roses growing from the rubble:

The secitions in black are still standing to this day:

A drawing of what the monastery and surrounding lands used to look like:

After visiting the monastery we drove to see some old (were talkin bronze and iron age) graves. There were about 530 of them covering a large field. We walked around for a few minutes and then drove 2km down the road to see some german megaliths. It was cool to see and touch some of the things we had learend about in art hisotry during our junior year at Priory.

The first megalith was basicly a bunch of large stones in a tight oval 50 ft long and 15ft wide with some large stones in the middle. 

The second meaglith was much larger. Large stones covered in dirt, 10 ft high, 15 ft wide, and at least 150ft long. In the middle was a small chamber about 4 ft tall, 10ft wide and 15ft long that we could still go in!

It took an estimated 100 people 3-4 months to complete it. Unfortunately cory didnt get to see either of these since he felt bad from the night before and decided to stay in the car. 

We headed from the megaliths to see an old fort in the netherlands (holland). It was actually really cool to cross the border because the lines on the roads all changed, and because germany and the netherlands have different laws on how you can build your home, the architecture changed a bit too. 

The fort was pretty sweet. It was built as a military compounds in the 16th century and then converted into a town in the 18th century. Its hard to get a feel for what the sorrounding area is like but just imagine that someone built this in the middle of iowa:

 Anyone who wanted to attack this fort would surley have a difficult time. Theres at least 2 moats to cross at any point and its impossible to hide from the fort's guns. There are no weak or blind spots, all bridges are retractable, and the community is self sufficent. The whole village was just very cool. 

After around an hour and a half at the fort (now a town called bourtange) we crossed back into germany and went out to a nice italian restaurant before coming home.

-grant