Kasteel de Haar

If you had asked my parents why they were visiting the Netherlands, they probably would've lied and told you that it was to see me and make sure I'm doing alright. But we all know they used me as an excuse to make their first trip to Europe. My mom made a list of things she HAD to see while she was here, and a castle was somewhere at the top. 

She picked out 2 Dutch castles and told me to take her to one of them. I chose Kasteel de Haar, which I thought was the closest and easiest to reach, but now I'm not so sure. It was just this side of Utrecht and should've been a direct bus ride from the (empty) station where we hopped of the train. Should've been. But they must've changed the bus route or something because the bus we wanted no longer stops at that station. We had to take a different bus to the original bus' stop, wait in the cold for 25 minutes and then take the right bus to another stop and then walk 20 minutes to the castle. 

So here's where we started having an OK time. 

This was on our walk to the castle. They're not normally that cute; I made them hold hands.

The castle was actually pretty cool. It had a couple moats, took up a lot of room and overlooked a really great garden (or moderately-great-in-the-wintertime garden). My mom kept walking into my photos, though.

A family, the van Zuylens, lives here for a month every year (that's not them in this photo. I assume they're much more royal). I can't tell you too much more because the tour was in Dutch.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside (that was basically the only thing they said to us in English), so this was the last one I got before the tour started. The inside was pretty much what you would expect the inside of a castle to look like: extravagant. The tour lasted roughly an hour and this is what I got out of it: Roger Moore somethingsomething something bedroom something somethingsomething Mr. James Bond something something joke. My mom understood the joke part, too, so she laughed.

After the tour, we saw little girls dressed as Disney princesses on their way to the entrance. It was super cute. Snow White was dragging a little prince (or a dwarf) way ahead of the pack. I miss those days of pulling boys along by their ears.

The weather was crummy, so we took one last picture of the castle and then hurried back to The Hague. Or went slowly on two buses and a train.