Sunday, May 7Holland, Michigan Another beautiful day, but cool and windy!We tried to roll out early to get to Nelis Dutch Village (a theme park of sorts) to catch a free shuttle into Hollands Tulip Time Festival, a 9 day celebration of the Dutch heritage of the town and of course the tulips that are so plentiful here. It is a good year to see the blooms since last year was the 'stem' festival we heard. We road in school buses only available this weekend. We de-bused downtown and walked to Windows on the Waterfront to get trolley tickets for an hour+ tour. We were so early that we got through the tour quickly before the traffic started! Holland is a very diverse, clean, modern city with a large rich historic district. It is an "IT" city. Having no knowledge of Michigan I had no idea what a great place this was to visit. Not only is today Tulip Time it is the graduation day for Hope College, an elite private religious school. The campus is in the historic district and closely entwined with the city. This city boasts of many streams of wealth. There is a large Heinz pickle factory in town. The economy includes timber, furniture, Dow, boat making. This is the home town of the current Secretary of Education. The downtown area suffered when the stores moved out to the malls. The wealthy families worked to restore and renew the historic district and did a fantastic job of it! The only thing I saw lacking was sit down restaurants and authentic Dutch food. After our tour we walked about a mile to try to find some authentic Dutch food, but I had read the wrong dates and they were closed, SO we hoofed it back a mile to wait for an hour to eat a burger, Greek salad and a sandwich. At least we got to sit and rest for a while. After lunch we headed to a park for the Dutch Dance. This was a block long people lined street dance. All the dancers are volunteers and must wear authentic dress. They did an outstanding job of choreographed dance in wooden shoes. The dancers were so happy, they really love there city here! They do this many times over the festival. Of course we got Susan a t-shirt at the craft fair going on in the park. We hoofed back to the shuttle stop and headed to go to Windmill Island. This is a park with the last working grain mill imported from The Netherlands. The line was so long we skipped the windmill itself, but saw lots more tulips fields, an original organ playing music, and a very interesting area. They had a replica area called Merchants/Tradesman Row typical of the late 1700's. There was also an area called Native Camp depicting local people who predate the Europeans. This was very well done. So we headed back on the shuttle to pick up our RV from the now very crowded parking lot. THAT IS WHEN IT HAPPENED: as we pulled on to the road the entire 18 piece set of Corelle that had been loaded into the upper cabinet came crashing to the floor. BOOM! BANG! LOUD! We pulled over and cleaned up lots of glass pieces! 7 pieces were broken. We will still be picking up glass for days to come. Back on the highway to Veldheer's Tulip Farm. There are 275 varieties in beds here and as well as fields of flowers. The beds are numbered so that one can order the bulbs from the farm. Many varieties are passed but still lots to see. There is buffalo on site as well as a Delft factory and a wooden shoe maker. This was a good stop as well. We stopped at Walmart on the way back to park to try to replace the dishes. Not all the pieces were in stock so we will continue to look for replacements along our journey. Have you bought Corelle lately? We should have bought stock in that company. Was there a mass exodus from New Dehli lately? MANY of there country men were here with their neighbors from Asia. It was difficult to take a photo without a contingency of them in it. This was a cold blustery day with bright sun. We wore most of the clothes we brought today in layers. We walked to exhaustion, but it was beautiful and interesting. We passed TWO Tim Hortons (Canadian Dunkin Donut equivalent) today without stopping, but it flung a craving on me!We drove 15 miles todayTo be continued....