Veenpark, Drenthe Province, The Netherlands

401dFo1ks 5:00 PM Jun 29, 2016

Don't Miss the Harmonium Museum. Interesting History of Peat Bogs
An interesting place to see the history of peat bogs in the Netherlands. The Harmonium Museum is also included and should not be missed. This museum has the largest collection of harmoniums (reed organs) in the world. They are well preserved and beautifully curated. The Veenpark offers a train ride to a demonstration peat bog that takes 45 minutes, including the demonstration. The train goes every hour. There is another train that goes to a historic village showing how workers in the bog lived. You should not miss this either. You can also ride on a boat from the village to the location near the Harmonium Museum. The walking distances are not far, but you can't walk to the peat bog demonstration. There is a self serve restaurant at the entrance and a pancake house near the village with the peat homes. We speak Dutch, so we enjoyed it a lot. They have a good explanation in English that you can pick up at the entrance desk.

4KnaresboroughBears 5:00 PM Nov 18, 2015

Surprisingly good fun for the kids
Veenpark is a large open air museum. I was initially dubious about taking our boys (7 and 5) but thought we had to do something educational, but they loved it. It is quite expensive (and like the rest of Holland you can't pay by credit card) but there is more than a full days worth of things to see and do, we arrived at 1 and still had quite a bit unexplored by 5. There's lots of transport to ride, two little trains and a boat. One train goes round the museum and another goes out into the country (crossing a canal by a lifting bridge). The long train journey stops for a peat cutting exhibition but we just walked back from there which was not far. What was particularly impressive was how 'hands on' everything was. You can buy old fashioned sweets in the grocery shop, there's games to play in the school yard, in the blacksmiths yard there are some old logs, hammers and rusty nails for you to practice hammering! The playground is good fun whilst you enjoy a cup of tea and a very good cake. The only downside is that there are a lot of wasps about the outside area of the cafe. The museum looked very interesting but we were hurrying out past it, the thing that really got my attention was the replica peat mummy sat on a bench looking at the displays! It turned out to be educational and fun, I was really pleased by how interested the boys were in how thing used to be particularly the very old village huts and the beds in cupboards.