September: Amsterdam

 The night before we were to drop off L'il Guy, we stayed just outside Amsterdam to make our drive to the port easier.  Jack had a friend in the campground that kept trying to bite his toes!

The next day, we drove to the dock area northwest of Amsterdam and said goodbye to L'il Guy and took a taxi back to the Marriott in central Amsterdam. The hotel was in a perfect spot for us to do all of our in-city sightseeing.

We took a canal cruise around the city that included the main harbor where this Tall Ship is permanently moored.

This is not a half sunken ship, it is their new maritime museum and the open deck part is filled with sand to make a beach!

Picturesque canal side homes, ships and many, many houseboats 

We visited the Anne Frank house.  By going after 7pm, the line was only one hour long - the attendant said the line had been three hours in the afternoon.!  The house itself was surprising as it was not a house, but a commercial building that Anne Frank's father had purchased to house his business of milling spices.  The building had been remodeled before it became a museum in the 60's.  Fortunately, the upstairs hidden rooms where the Franks and two other families lived were not disturbed and we could see the various magazine cutouts, etc., that Anne glued to the walls to decorate them, like most teenage girls.

This small statue of Anne Frank is just around the corner in a church courtyard

Surprisingly, this is the front of the Anne Frank house.

The only member of the family to survive was Anne's father and he personally made sure the rooms were authentic.  Anne and her sister died of typhus, just weeks before the camps were liberated.  So tragic.

Amsterdam Canal Flower Market

boats everywhere

bicycles everywhere

A popular store that specializes in American and British food

We thoroughly enjoyed the vibrant spirit of Amsterdam and we walked miles and miles along the canals.  We did make a quick tour of the infamous Red Light District on a Saturday afternoon, but it was ridiculously tame....older, overweight women in the windows in bikinis.  Maybe because it was the afternoon?  We spent two very busy days in Amsterdam, but loved all of Holland.

Next stop:  Summerville, South Carolina and home.  It has been an astounding trip with a few difficult moments, but truly the dream trip of a lifetime.

Early September: Southwestern Holland

These corkscrews bring the water uphill from the canals to sea level

After Alkmaar, we needed propane, but we could not fill up in the Netherlands because of our adapter issue.  So, we headed southwest to Belgium where we knew we could get propane.  On our way back, we stopped at Kinderdijk, 15 km east of Rotterdam - a UNESCO world heritage site where there are a collection of traditional Dutch windmills along the canals.  These were built to remove the water from the land uphill to the sea.  The Dutch have a saying:  God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.

The inner workings of the windmill are all wooden and creak and groan LOUDLY

View from atop one of the windmills

West of Rotterdam, we visited the city of Delft.  We learned that there is practically no way to determine if a piece of Delft was authentically hand made in Delft, so we gave up trying to find a good piece.  The medieval city center was a joy, but you sure have be careful because those bicyclists are everywhere!

Church at one end of City Center Square

Town Hall at other end of Delft Center City Square

Flowers, Canals - a pretty city

Delft Cityscape

We headed back north to visit Zaanse Schans windmill village just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam.  The village was small and all were turned into commercial shops with two windmills.  Many busloads of tourists from Amsterdam encouraged us to quickly tour the area and get out.  We were spoiled terribly by the much more authentic village in Enkhuizen and the windmills in Kinderdijk, but we did learn that these were "industrial" windmills that were used in milling grains and other commercial uses and not to protect the land from the sea.

Shops in Zaans Scans

We drove further north to visit Volendam and Marken.  We were planning on staying at the marina in Volendam where we could walk to the town center, but the city was gearing up for a major carnival the next weekend and the carnival folks had taken over the entire campground.  We could not find a place to park, so just drove through Volendam, an upscale resort area for Amsterdam weekenders.We ended up staying in a parking area next to a tourist attraction that made Gouda cheese and wooden shoes - a major stop for the bus hordes.  We visited just before closing when it was quiet and were part of a small group that was much more enjoyable than a huge crowd.

We drove down and around and out onto the former island of Marken, one of the old traditional fishing villages on the Zuider Zee.  It was a quaint village, still lived in, with one-lane brick roads and a small marina.  It was picturesque, but other than a few restaurants and a wooden clog shop, not much to see or do.

Machine-assisted wooden clogs

Late August: Germany into The Netherlands

This is an historical marina with lots of old wooden boats.

We drove as far north as Oldenburg in Germany and then headed west into The Netherlands.

We drove north to the dikes protecting Holland from the North Sea - quaint villages, sheep grazing on the dikes and a few small resort/marina areas.  We stayed at a nice campground/resort on a inlet with an historical marina, a couple of good restaurants and a grocery store.  Nothing else for miles around.

View from the campground

The scenery is absolutely flat, except for the dikes with farmland as far as you can see.  The farmland is grazing land and a lot of corn and a few other crops we do not recognize...the tulip fields ablaze with color in the spring are far to the South.  This is part of Holland that still sees iced over canals for the famous Dutch skaters.

Sheep grazing on the dike

View from atop the dike next to a quaint Dutch village

This roads in this entire village were brick.  The paved path on the right is for bicycles.  I do not think there is anywhere in Holland that is not connected by bike path to everywhere else.

Typical small village home - this one has both the thatched roof and the swan gable decorations on the peaks that we saw everywhere.

Yup, Jack with his finger in the dike......

A typical canal in a small town with fishing boats, sailboats and houseboats.

The stepped roof typical of medieval Dutch buildings

After spending a few days roaming around the northern countryside, we headed south along what used to be the Zuider Zee to Enkhuizen.  This is an outdoor museum where they have rescued ancient homes from around the ZuiderZee villages and recreated a farming village and marina.

The marina just outside the historically recreated town

Goats and swans are everywhere throughout Holland

The main part of town also had an indoor museum that dealt with the terrible Zuider Zee flooding that has occurred throughout the centuries and the history of the many small towns on the former Zuider Zee.  It also talked about how a dike/dam was put in that slowly converted the Zuider Zee into an inland fresh water lake.

Fascinating room that provides a multi-sensory experience of being in a storm and flooding

No museum in Holland is without ships and these side paddles (forgot the name) are unique to the Dutch.  Because they needed to be able to sail in very shallow water, they could not have a deep keel and these paddles were lowered into place in deeper water to provide the equivalent of a keel.

These wooden boats were gorgeous.

We headed west to the small city of Alkmaar, famous for their Saturday morning cheese market, recreated just as they have done for centuries.

Gouda cheese rounds

The guys in the different color hats sling the straps for these carriers over the necks and then run, not walk, the cheeses into the weighing house.

Weighing the cheese

View of the Cheese Museum in Alkmaar - a pretty city with lots of canals, of course.

Alkmaar canal houses

 The cheese market brings all kinds of vendors to make a festival every Saturday.  This one was making wooden shoes, all by hand.