Trip to Haarlem

February 18- Today I decided to go on a long bike ride to Haarlem with Jacob, Ian, Dan, Andrew, and Anna.  The bike ride took us 2.5 hours to bike 20 miles there.  Haarlem is located about 15 miles west of Amsterdam, but we took a 5 mile detour on accident.  We followed a river for most of the way to Haarlem which made it a nice and peaceful bike ride.

On the way there we stopped at a Turkish restaurant for lunch in a town called Halfweg.  I ordered a Donur, which is like a gyro and looked like this:

The food was really good and the owner of the small restaurant brought us a large plate of fries for free.  After lunch we finally made it to Haarlem and began to explore.  We were greeted with a huge stone entrance that looked like it belonged on a castle.

We biked to what seemed to be the center of the city because an extremely large cathedral was right in the center.  

There I found the hotel that my family stayed at previously 4 years ago on a two week trip through Europe. 

The hotel was located right next to the giant cathedral.  We walked around more and stumbled upon the Corrie Ten Boom museum.  The Ten Booms were watchmakers and lived above their store.  But what they are most famous for was hiding Jews during WWII.  Corrie also wrote a book called "The Hiding Place."  

The Ten Boom's hid the Jews behind a brick wall in one of the rooms in the house.  In order to get behind the wall, a small secret sliding door was hidden in the bookshelf.  

The picture above shows "The Hiding Place"  with some of the bricks removed in order to see better.  After the tour we decided to start to head back seeing that the time was around 4:30pm and it gets dark early this time of year.  So we biked back and took us 1.5 hours instead of 2.5 on the trip to Haarlem.  It was also snowing as we got back to our dorms.  Overall the trip was extremely cold but very enjoyable once I could feel my fingers again.  I will most likely do the same bike ride when the temperature warms up.