Mason and the BC Cadets headed to Battlefields

All my friends are proud of their grandchildren but Phyllis is very proud and so she should be!  Her grandson Mason is 15 years old and has been an army cadet for three years.  There was a contest open to cadets to submit a video showing why you want to visit the Canadian battlefields in Europe.  Ten people were chosen to have their trip paid for by the three sponsors and Mason was chosen!  When we saw Mason at Christmas he explained how he made the video and told us how excited he was when he was chosen!  The tour is 10 days.  What a fantastic way to spend Spring Break!

The entire group at the Vancouver Airport
Army Cadet League of B.C.

Mason and Dana Garcia
Dana was the person responsible for the sponsorship!
Sponsors: Canada 150, Royal Canadian Legion and the Former BC Liberal Government

Mason with Major Barrett, a Military Officer

Mason being interviewed by Breakfast Television!
A piper escorted them through the terminal.

From their blog:
We're back at the hotel now, after a busy day in Amsterdam--where we had a full day out. We spent the morning with Gerwin, our local guide, who took us through the city on a bus tour, making reference to the founding of Amsterdam on the river Amstel, and the Golden Age of the 17th-Century Netherlands. We hopped off the bus for a quick photo stop at the "I Love Amsterdam" sign at Museumplein in the city's south, before heading to a small suburb called Amstelveen, where we visited a working cheese farm and learned about the traditional way of making Dutch wooden clogs, and sampled various cheeses.

After our morning visit, we broke for lunch and had a bit of free time to visit the Bloemenmarkt (a floating flower market) and walked towards the Jewish Quarter, historical home to Amsterdam's Jewish community. There, we visited the Jewish Historical Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue--dating from 1675 and built for the Sephardic Jewish coming from Spain and Portugal in the late 1600s--and the Deportation Centre, which is now the National Holocaust Memorial to memorialize the tens of thousands of Amsterdam Jewish killed during World War II. We had a brief chat with a volunteer working close by, and walked by the city's Auschwitz Memorial before dinner.

We had dinner (Indonesian beef rendang with rice, and brownies for dessert) at Drover's Dog, a small Australian-owned bistro in the Jewish Quarter, before heading back to the hotel ahead of our departure for Belgium tomorrow.

Amsterdam

National Holocaust Museum

The weather looks really nice!