In the polders

Vianen city hall  On the chimney there was a stork nest but lacking a telephoto lens, hard to capture Saw many storks on our trip

lunch stop in Schoonhoven

A cute town we spent an hour walking the streets

Kinderdijk, a World Heritage site. Lots of windmills

Relaxing back on de Fiep moored in Dordecht. I went for a walk with a new friend

love the shutters

our floating home

We would see this French fry man in every city. Fries, big mounts of them, came with mayonnaise, not catsup

I had strange Dutch snack foods here. Fried curry noodles, fried cheese croquets, fried meatballs (bitterballen)

Normally I avoid all such stuff but....

We did stop to tour one of the windmills. At one point, a family of 16 lived in this one. The mom got caught in the mechanism somehow leaving the dad to take care of 14 kids. Very tight living quarters

inside a windmill

Our barge goes back and forth from Bruges to Amsterdam and back to Amsterdam though it remains in  Amsterdam for the winter as a floating b&b. One disadvantage was as we were heading south and east, often we were battling winds especially our afternoon in the polders. Nothing to break the 30 mph headwinds. Also we were going back in time: Amsterdam's hey day was in the 1600s, Antwerp 1500s, Ghent 1400s and Bruges in the 1300s.

So much of the Netherlands is comprised of polders, reclaimed land from the seas.  This land is below sea level and kept dry through an intricate system of dykes and windmills to pump the water out. They are expert hydraulic engineers. In contrast, the US has only one polder area, New Orleans, and w can't figure out how to keep that dry. Belgium has some polders too though not as much as the Netherlands. They released the water back into the polders to stop the Germans at one point during the war. Hard to get tanks through 6 feet of water.

Before lunch, we biked through a series of pretty villages and gardens before stopping in Schoonhoven, a silversmith center though the shops were closed on Sunday. We waited to cross a ferry and onto the polders. Some farming is done in them, potatoes and sugar beets. Lots of waterbirds; mergansers, storks, pheasants, coots. I am in pretty good shape but the winds sucked the energy out of some. I was trying to teach my friend to draft. We did stop in Kinderdyke to see the windmills. We went inside one of them. According to their meter, we were experiencing near gale force gusts. The windmills were certainly spinning that day. Two young women were walking slowly on top of horses when one of the front legs of the horse buckled and the girl came tumbling down hard. An ambulance was called. Never saw that before.  We didn't have much further to the boat where we cruised to Dordrecht, the oldest town of Holland and where the country was formed by William of Orange. Lots of pretty buildings.We had a guided tour after dinner.