Oct 04, 2026
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Finding Your Dutch Iowa Roots
Discover how Pella and Orange City connect your family history to the Netherlands archives.
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Love Netherlands
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Dear Netherlands,
Somewhere in the Netherlands right now, someone is pouring a pint of something dark — perfectly. Somewhere, a tulip field is waiting to bloom. Somewhere, a baker is sliding the first tray of stroopwafels onto the counter while the smell fills the whole street. The Dutch don’t make a fuss. They just make things the way their parents and their parents’ parents made them.
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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In today’s email:
- Discover Your Iowa Dutch Ancestry: Tracing Roots from Pella and Orange City to the Netherlands
- At The Café — Café Hoppe — The Brown Café at the Centre of Amsterdam
- Around The Web — Rotterdam Netherlands: Complete Guide to Things to Do and See, Dutch Healthcare for American Retirees: Everything You Need to Know (2026), The Dutch-American Homecoming: From New York to Old Holland + more
- From Love Netherlands — The Love Netherlands Guide № 007: Dutch Beer & Brewing
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Boerenkaas — The Farmhouse Cheese With a Protected Name
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Discover Your Iowa Dutch Ancestry: Tracing Roots from Pella and Orange City to the Netherlands
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There are valleys in Scotland that are beautiful. Then there is Glencoe, which is something else entirely. The moment you pass through this glacial valley in the western Highlands, the scale of it hits you. Steep ridges rising over 900 metres on either side. A wide, flat floor carved out by ice over thousands of years. A sky that seems to press down low, especially when cloud rolls in from the west. Glencoe does not ease you in gently — it announces itself. This is not a destination that has been prettified for tourists. The drama here is entirely natural and historical. Both are worth understanding before you visit. Love Scotland’s wild places? Get weekly travel stories, hidden gems, and practical guides — free to your inbox. Subscribe to Love Scotland Newsletter → How Glencoe Was Formed Glencoe sits within a supervolcano caldera — one of the few in the British Isles. Around 420…
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Have you been there? Do you have a memory of this corner of the Netherlands? Hit reply and tell us — we’d love to hear your story.
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At The Café
Café Hoppe — The Brown Café at the Centre of Amsterdam
Café Hoppe on the Spui has been pouring beer since 1670 — long enough that the wooden floor has sunk slightly at the door from three and a half centuries of footfall. It’s the kind of place where the bartender knows the regulars’ orders, the tourists get treated exactly the same as the locals, and the bitterballen come out exactly hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth if you don’t wait. It sits right in the middle of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the Dam, and it’s one of the last genuinely authentic brown cafés you can still find without trying. Come in the late afternoon, sit outside on the pavement, and order a beer.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
When a Dutch bartender pulls your lager, scrapes the foam flat with a little spatula and hands it over with two fingers of white head still on top, that is not sloppiness — it is the house style, and arguing about it is practically a national pastime. The Netherlands sells pale pilsner around the world, yet behind the big green bottles sits a Trappist abbey brewing under papal-era rules, a brewery working inside a 400-year-old windmill, and a…
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Photo by Dave Visser on Unsplash
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Boerenkaas — The Farmhouse Cheese With a Protected Name
Boerenkaas is the protected designation for cheese made on a Dutch farm with raw milk from that farm’s own cows, by the farmer themselves, with no industrial shortcuts. It tastes nothing like the supermarket Gouda. Younger wheels are creamy and sweet; aged ones develop deep crystalline cracks and a flavour that lingers for minutes. Every Friday, in Alkmaar’s old Waagplein cheese market, you’ll see boerenkaas being weighed on antique scales — a pageant for tourists and a real trade for cheesemakers. Pair it with apple, walnut and a glass of jenever.
👉 Read the full story
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Also From Our Family
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Or Scotland? Join 43,000 Scotland lovers — lovescotland.substack.com
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