July 24, 2019

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In spite of the heat, it was hard to get up this morning. Air conditioning in these parts are rare, since this kind of heat wave normally only lasts for a few days before the rains return. Not this summer. Windows and drapes are kept closed during the day to keep out the heat, then opened at night to get fresh and colder air back in. There are no insect screens here, so when the windows are open at night, we keep the lights low, or off, to keep away the few mosquitos they have here. The one or two that do get by our defences can be annoying though as you hear them buzzing around your naked skin.

Our plan today was to stay in air-conditioned places like museums. We started off at the Nuenen Vincentre, dedicated of course to Vincent Van Gogh who lived here for a while. While there were no original of his paintings here, they’re all at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this place tells his story, the people that surrounded him, and the various places he lived at and what he learned there. Very well done. Nuenen is a very picturesque place, like most small villages here, and we walked around in the heat a bit to get some pictures of the little church that his father was a priest at. A well-deserved break at a restaurant called Aardapple Eters, meaning Potato Eaters after one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings worth over $100 million right now. Marion had the Coffee Milkshake (with lots of whipping cream of course), while I stayed with the more traditional Brabant’s drink called Batavia.

Following some pretty nice backcountry roads with small villages, farmlands and industries strategically organized throughout, we paid a visit to the Boerenbonds Museum, an open-air farming museum. I had seen this in 2015 but thought Marion would like it. She did, but the heat became quite unbearable in the open and we headed back towards Helmond, a city east of Eindhoven to see if we could find the castle and museum there. We did but it was about to close so we headed back to our house and the welcoming pool. Maybe should have done that earlier.

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