The Goat Farm

After some quick researching (okay extensive; this was the first “vacation” I have gotten in Europe since Martin and I got married and wanted to make the most of it) on things to do in and around Amsterdam with kids, one place kept on coming up: Geitenboerderij Ridammerhoeve. Everyone was raving about it! And even better, while just outside of Amsterdam it was also incredibly close to where we were staying on the coast. I added it to my list of things to potentially check out while abroad.

Turns out it was the highlight of the trip. I should never doubt multiple recommendations from mothers in the know. It will save me from the roller coast of emotions I had leading up to the actual visit to the farm.

Before we left San Francisco I was super excited based on the various recommendations I had read. I mean, who wouldn’t be excited about goats? That, plus it was something that I got to plan as compared to normal trips home where I have no input. The more I thought about it though, I began to worry that it wouldn’t be the success I was hoping for. I mean the moms whose recommendations I was following might have older kids rather than a toddler and even if they did have toddlers, Oskar wasn’t that excited about the animals at Tilden Park so he might not like this experience.

So I did a little more research and realized that it was age appropriate for a toddler... but even more amazing I learned you could do yoga with the goats on the weekends. You can imagine my disappointment knowing we were in town over a weekend but I wouldn’t be able to go due to family stuff.

The day before we went, I began to again doubt my decision to bring 6 adults out to the middle of nowhere based on some random people recommendations.  And the morning of our outing I had a brief moment of dread when we got to the location and found ourselves potentially lost. 

We were in fact thankfully not lost, we just needed to walk the ten minutes from the parking lot to the actual farm.  And upon first glance I knew it was going to be a fun day. I will let the photos speak for themselves but in summary, it took Oskar about 10 minutes to warm up to the goats and various other animals (although he never trusted the free range chickens) and after that initial time Oskar couldn’t get enough of the goats... he wanted to pet them, follow them into the barn and even go down the slide with them.