The first stop on my tour of the Dutch Countryside was a cheese farm. We didn’t actually get to see any animals really, but we did get to watch this lady in traditional Dutch clothing, talk to us about how the cheese is made, show us cheese in a couple of different stages (such as curds and whey) and show us how some of the machines worked. After that we went into a gift shop where you could buy all sorts of cheese and cheese related products and eat as many free samples as you wanted! They had one kind of sheep cheese even that I really wanted to buy, but I wasn’t sure if it would keep throughout all of my travels.
We went to another small city (unfortunately I can’t remember the names of any of the cities we went to) and saw the drawbridge working while we were there. They have the coolest drawbridges:
There was even a cheese festival and performance at this city we went to!
We took a ferry to a small fishing village after that to walk through and see some traditional houses and lifestyles, as well as just how people are living. It seemed a little strange to walk through the small sidewalks and streets of these people’s lives, but apparently they’re used to it because a lot of other tours went there as well.
After that we took a long, long drive to the large dike holding all the water out of Holland and keeping the country from flooding! That’s only in part true, but it was pretty awesome to see. They built a tall tower for tourists to take pictures from.
There was a lot of cool information about the history and some commemorative statues of the architect and in memory of the workers:
After that came windmills!
We got to go inside one of the windmills and watch it make peanut oil! There are rollers that crush the peanuts into a powder and then that powder is heated up to help release the oils and then pounded by a weight that’s lifted and then dropped by the windmill. It was pretty cool, though it didn’t seem like much could be produced very quickly.
Windmills were followed by a wooden shoe making demonstration. They have hand-based tools which will carve the outside and the inside based on the shape of a mold so they have to change out each individual shoe, and then the machines automatically carve!
There were a lot of wooden shoes… Probably at least 20 times more of this hanging on all of the walls and then they were hanging from all of the ceilings as well. 
That was the end of our Dutch Countryside tour. I thoroughly enjoyed it, enjoyed the long bus ride and having both seats to myself. It was sort of interesting because our tour was in Spanish, English and French, which meant our tour guide said everything three times. And he also spoke Dutch! I was impressed. I can’t even speak in Spanish anymore.
The day after that I traveled a whirlwind of museums. I visited the Van Gogh museum, the Rijks museum and the Troppen museum before my feet were finally too tired and I went home. The museums in Amsterdam are much smaller than many of the museums in the US. In the US we seem to try to fit everything into a single museum in a city, but in Amsterdam there were several smaller museums so it didn’t take you three days to simply walk through a single building.
I spent the evening relaxing, packing and doing laundry before getting ready to go on my next two week long adventure!
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