For awhile now I have wanted to return to Europe to complete my research on the Besloten Hofje. Five years ago I made the initial pilgrimage to the Low Countries to see as many of the shrines as possible and take as many pictures as I could. The hope was that I could take detailed pictures so that I might be able to recreate the flowers on my own. I took 1200 photos but sadly, only about a quarter of them turned out.

I was able to recreate some of the flowers but really detailed pictures eluded me. And I was busy with work and life; I got married and other art projects took priority. But now that I have more free-time I got back into the flower making.

But this time I took a different approach. Perhaps I could document all the early flowers in photos, create instructions that others could follow, and wrap it all up in book form with a complete history. It’s a goal I can get excited about! And then I can create a shrine of my own and use the book for supporting documentation and enter it in the arts competition for the reenactment group I belong to.

So I made a list of the shrines left to visit, started translating some source material while requesting some books from the library, and getting all geeky about my favorite subject. This trip will be a lot more pre-planned than the first one.

One the first trip we, my mother and I, went to Mecheln where there a number of the shrines. We visited Herentels where we met Peter who then took us to see the shrine in Geel. We saw the ones in Antwerp, Xanten, Kalkar, and Rheine.

The ones we missed were either out-of-the-way and there were transportation issues or, as with the case of Koln, closed, or too far away for our limited travel time.

Our trip this time around was planned in an attempt to hit all of the remaining sites. With that in mind we are flying into Hamburg and then hitting Schwerin (which does not have a shrine per se but does have some Christ Child statues that were dressed by nuns in the Middle Ages and I want to get a look at the clothes), Ebstorf, and Walrode and then heading to Koln. From there we will visit the remaining sites in Belgium and the one site in France.

I kept a travel log for the first trip and that can be found at http://roxelana.com/blog/

So I have the passport and the tickets and, more importantly, I have a plan. The adventure has begun.