The place does a dad take his seven-year-old when she claims to be the one one in every of her mates to have by no means gone overseas?
New York? Too far. Rome? Too costly. Disneyland Paris? Not very, effectively, international.
So I take Kitty to the Netherlands, a rustic nonetheless related in my creativeness with wood slip-on footwear, mice on staircases, canals and windmills.
The Day by day Mail’s Michael Hodges took his seven-year-old daughter Kitty on her first journey overseas to Groningen, a historic college metropolis within the Netherlands. Pictured is the Noorderhaven canal at night time
Not Amsterdam, however Groningen. The place? Properly, it’s an historic college metropolis within the nation’s northern flatlands with a medieval meals market — the Vismarkt — which specialises in herring, cheese and an enormous number of potatoes.
Groningen additionally has Europe’s premier comedian museum, a fairytale tower to climb — the Fifteenth-century Martinitoren — and, a clincher for those who’re with a toddler who likes music, a twice-yearly music pageant for the under-12s referred to as My First Competition.
On our first night time we go to the Riemer bookshop on Nieuwe Ebbingestraat, the place there’s a tiny door that opens right into a separate child-sized retailer for the smaller bibliophile. It’s alongside the Noorderhaven canal, a part of the round waterway across the historical metropolis centre.
Wherever a avenue crosses the canal, it have to be lifted if there’s a boat coming by way of. As there’s a lot of water site visitors, to Kitty’s delight, we maintain encountering vertical partitions of street the place bridges have been raised.
In addition to floating eating places, bars and houseboats, there’s additionally a child-centred artwork gallery on the canal. The Groninger Museum is a brash jumble of shapes and angles that bursts from the water by the principle railway station.
In-built 1994, it’s the imaginative and prescient of designers and designers together with Philippe Starck and Maarten Baas. The venerable metropolis may be very trendy design-conscious — there’s a public rest room by architect Rem Koolhaas at 22 Schuitemakersstraat.
Charming: The town boasts a fairytale tower, the Fifteenth-century Martinitoren (left), plusthe kooky Groninger Museum (proper)
Baas now has a giant present on on the museum (Disguise & Search, till September 24) and in it does the types of issues kids get pleasure from and fathers disapprove of, comparable to taking a Rennie Waterproof coat chair and setting fireplace to it, then exhibiting the charred stays.
Baas creates manic fairground installations from mirrored glass and light-weight bulbs, he traps individuals in grandfather clocks (intelligent use of laptop animation, however I don’t point out that to Kitty) and makes furnishings from melted plastic.
We discover much more cartoonish enjoyable on the Nederlands Stripmuseum, which sounds prefer it needs to be in Amsterdam, however is definitely about comedian strips.
Other than the McDonald’s Museum in Des Plaines, Illinois, it’s the one museum on this planet that you simply enter by way of a McDonald’s.
A really glad Kitty tucking into some native fare
This summer time’s most important exhibition is on Jan, Jans En De Kinderen, a long-running Dutch newspaper strip and TV present. Kitty loves it, presumably as a result of Jan and Jans have two daughters who invariably get the higher of their father.
The extra standard mode of transport in Groningen is bicycle. I’m nervous about permitting a toddler to cycle by way of a metropolis, however the employees on the bike rent store chuckle at my fears.
We keep on the Scholar Lodge, simply exterior the inside canal. Laidback and enjoyable, it is stuffed with beanbags and my companion declares its breakfast the ‘finest on this planet’.
Someday, we cycle to the De Oosterpoort arts centre for My First Competition. There are nursery rhymes for the toddlers, pop teams for the older kids and punk bands for the dads.
It additionally has life-size fashions of cows with squeezable udders that present lemonade as a substitute of milk. This implies it takes me a while to ascend the 260 steps of the Martinitoren that afternoon.
Kitty, being seven, bounds up two steps at a time.
