For Memorial Day – Margraten American Cemetery
posted in: Observations, Travel
8
I’m skipping a bit ahead of the photos from our trip to The Netherlands and Belgium in honor of Memorial Day. On April 18 we made a stop for a tour of Margraten American Cemetery. It was there that we learned how important the cemetery is to the local Dutch populace. Each grave it taken care of by a local resident, and usually that responsibility has been passed down through the generations. On the anniversary of each death, flowers are placed at the grave, like the ones below.
The gentleman who led our tour is also a member of a group called Faces of Margraten, which endeavors to locate as many photos of the over 10,000 people buried in the cemetery, and then every May they hold an event where they display the 4,000 they’ve collected so far. The level of respect they have for the American soldiers who died fighting to free the Netherlands from Nazi rule, even after 70 years have passed, was both encouraging, and depressing to know that too many Americans don’t have that same level of respect for those who gave their lives fighting. Maybe because the war occurred there, instead of on our own soil, we lack the same level of understanding, or maybe we just suck at teaching people history. Either way, if you’ve never been to an American cemetery on foreign soil, I highly recommend it.
“Each for his own memorial earned praise that will never die and with it the grandest of all sepulchres not that in which his mortal bones are laid but a home in the minds of men.”
Single Red and Yellow In The Rain
Ex-Church
I guess this is the state of religion in this area of the Netherlands. They wanted to keep this historic and lovely church, but it’s a shopping area with apartments now.
Rainy Bed of Tulips
Leaning Buildings
There are hoists on top of these buildings, which is how you would get furniture and other heavy items into the house, but to prevent the items from swinging and breaking windows, the building itself leans out.
Rain on the Canal
Sidewalk Cafe in Hoorn
Keukenhof Garden
This is the first of many posts to come from our trip to the Netherlands and Belgium in April. We took a river cruise, so we didn’t really get to choose when we went to a specific place, we had one chance to see what we wanted to see, and capture the photos we could.
As a photographer, sometimes you are faced with that situation, and you just have to make the best of it. Our morning at Keukenhof fell into that category, as it was a pretty rainy morning. Never mind the rain and the crowds though, this would be our only chance to check out the tulips, so we weren’t going to let that stop us! Besides, some times the raindrops really help make for some interesting photos too, like these.
Of course, aside from the beautiful landscape and flowers in the gardens, they also had some amazing tulip displays in one of the pavilions as well, where it was nice and dry.
I’ll have quite a few more photos from the garden, and some more stops from this trip, in the coming weeks!