Oisterwijk....

Lisa and I had a fun afternoon exploring around the youth hostel where we had planned to host Dutch Nash Hash in early October. For awhile it looked like we might have been able to pull it off despite COVID-19, but we finally came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work with the venue restrictions. She had suggested having a dinosaur theme, so we stopped back in January at a dinosaur park to see if it would be a good place for a beer break. Since they don’t serve beer, that was an easy place to cross off the list.

We parked in the town and then walked out to the venue and back.

We came across a cool outdoor amphitheater and thought it could be fun to circle up here, but the dates wouldn’t have worked (at least in pre-corona days when it was actively used until mid-October).

I loved that the town had this lovely set of trees in the middle of the main road.

On our drive home, we stopped outside of Tilburg at De Koningshoeven Brewery, a Dutch Trappist brewery founded in 1884 that brews under the name La Trappe.

There were no more tours that day, but we managed to find seats in the crowded bar so we could taste one of their seasonal brews. We had originally hoped to have a beer stop here for the ballbreaker trail, but that’s now dependent on if we change locations entirely for next year.

The monks had largely run the brewery inside the monastery until 1999. Now their role is much smaller, but they still remain active in the business to ensure the ability to label the beers as Trappist.