European Vacation 1973

One of the memories that I have is that when I was about 12 years old my parents decided to take the whole family to Europe before Diana left for college. They wanted us to see where they had grown up and where our heritage was. We saved and prepared for about two years. Mom made us a bunch of clothes, I can remember she made Pam and I some matching pantsuits. Mom was always so organized on trips; she knew exactly where everything was and always had our swim suits on top so when we got to the hotel we were ready to go.

The first leg of out trip was for us to all, there were eight of us, somehow fit into our Buick LeSabre with enough luggage for three weeks, and drive the miles from Kansas City to New York City. Lucky for us there were no seat belt laws. I am not sure how we did it, but I do remember sleeping on the floor of the car. New York was terrifying because to us it was such a big and unfriendly place. We stayed in a Holiday Inn close to JFK airport. This is where the first of our trip “disasters” happened; someone at the hotel stole all of the traveler’s checks out of our bags. Back then you didn’t have debit cards so you would purchase traveler’s checks to pay for everything. Dad needed to run around to get those replaced and we were off to the airport.

Our flight was on a charter airline called Saturn Airlines. We were not the savvy travelers that we are today. We were of course early, that is the VanderHoeven way. We waited hours and hours to finally board our plane. I can’t imagine being my mother trying to keep six kids and Dad all clean and happy as our flight delays continued.

We landed in Frankfurt, Germany, rented a VW bus (the original mini van) and drove to Dad’s sister, Mary Ann’s, home. She lived close to a park and we were able to play with the local German kids. It was really lots of fun.

In Holland we rented a place in the Hague. It was called the “House of Trudy”. This was our base so that we could travel all over Holland to see the sights. Some of my best memories were of traveling through the canals of Amsterdam on a tour boat, walking along the beach and boulevard in Schevningen, seeing lots of tulips and windmills, and meeting family we had never before met. We also were able to see the homes that my parents grew up in and lived in during World War II. One of my favorite places there is Madurodam, it has scale models or buildings and things that can be seen all over the Netherlands. It is so fun to see how even the trees are cut to look like they are in scale with the small buildings. It was pretty cold when we were at Madurodam and Jeffrey turned out getting pneumonia. He was pretty sick for a while but once he got on medication he recovered pretty quickly.

There are so many memories of that trip but I will let my sisters and brothers write about some of their memories.