Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Barns, bedrooms, borgs and brrrrr!

Today we are nearing the German border. The scenery is becoming flatter, canals fewer, the roads wider, the fields larger. There are more detached houses and the farmhouses are huge with attached barns more than five times the size of the house. Monster-sized. We can't get over them. Some even have two or three barns of gigantic proportions.

We would have loved to have seen inside at least one of the barns before we left the Netherlands, but the only one we've had access to has been renovated into a coffee shop so was quite unrecognisable as a barn.

Question: With all these animals kept in these massive 'rump barns' in winter whatever happens to the accumulated methane effluent? How scary would a lit match be? And how on earth does a farmer muck out these massive barns in the depths of winter? And can you imagine the size of the mound of accumulated gunk at the end of winter with all these animals indoors: chickens, goats, cows and horses?

Continuing our quest to learn more about all things that keep Netherlands afloat we headed to the museum of a terp village in Warffum. Overall, this was more a reconstruction of an 18th century set of small dwellings which had been built on a mound. Some were relocated from different parts of the Netherlands. So, not really about being a terp village at all; more about the functionality of such 18th century Dutch homes.

Here, again, we found the displays would have benefitted from some attempt at multilingual translation, but these are small parochial museums and might not attract too many overseas crowds, tho' we did notice Canadians on our page in the Visitor's Book, so there are some.

Most of the houses displayed rooms whose main function was either the formal living or dining room with cupboard doors in the walls. These were interesting. These simple cupboard doors in a living room closed in a built-in bed for the householder, tucked away into the wall.

The cupboard beds in these rooms were all about hip high, with shelves or drawers built-in underneath. Very functional. They reminded us of the beds that Rene prefers, and he even had one built along similar lines, at home: on a high platform with the mattress atop that, and beneath all sensible slide-out storage space.

These days we have such massive space, whole large rooms for separate bedrooms, that really offer not much more than extra space without any real extra functionality, and this looks such a cosy option for such a cold climate.

Part of our agenda coming this route was to visit the borgs, or old castles, or estate houses that are at various locations around this region. Today we visited a couple of them that are similar to some of the smaller chateaux in France, but the weather has been so appalling that we hardly gave them the time they deserved.

Ice chips are floating on the air down from the Arctic.

Peter has voted to go to Spain.