Amersfoort

 We are now in Amersfoort which is a beautiful city that it says on-line, is only 33 minutes from Amsterdam on the fast train. However, it is really peaceful and absolutely beautiful.

It became a city in 1259 when it was a very popular trading city at the junction of two rivers. 

We liked it a lot and wandered around looking at the beautiful old houses, and being surprised at the lack of fellow tourists.

It is also famous for it's Koppelport, the only combined land and river gate still in existence in the Netherlands.

Amersfoort was also the birthplace of Piet Mondrian in 1872 and his house is now a lovely museum.

When he was young he painted landscapes and flowers and these paintings sold quite well. However as he got older and he had moved to Paris he began experimenting with his now very famous and individual style.

The museum does not have any of his modern paintings, but it has a life size mock up of his studio in New York where he moved to just a few years before his death in 1944.

It was very cleverly done and brought it all to life. He was was fascinated with colour and shape and his whole apartment was decorated with large coloured squares and shapes, and he moved them around constantly.

After his death and the apartment was emptied the movers found thousands of tiny pin holes in all of the walls from where he used to hang his squares.

His signature style did not sell well in his lifetime and he used to paint and sell pictures of flowers to earn a living, but just before he died his modern paintings began to be popular.

His signature style has now been copied thousands of times, including famously in the Tour de France by the team La Vie Claire and Bernard Hainault.

I bought a glasses case and Daz bought a pen shaped like a tube of paint.

In the evening we went out for dinner in the main square and left just as they were setting up a big screen to watch a Finnish film with Dutch subtitles.

We instinctively knew it just wasn't for us.