Holiday in the Netherlands 🇳🇱 Part 1

David and I have come back from 8 days in The Netherlands, firstly by taking a river cruise, then a few days stay in Amsterdam. Last Thursday we flew from Southampton Airport to Schipol in Amsterdam for transfer to our ship (in sailing terms the passenger carrying vessels are called ships, not boats). There were long queues at Schipol Airport to get through passport control, which apparently is nothing unusual, but having got through that we found our transfer to the ship. There’d also been problems with flights out of UK airports due to bad weather so sailing was a little late. View across Amsterdam from the ship.

Our first stop was Enkhuizen a town to the north which has an outdoor museum called the Zuider Zee Museum, to which you arrived by boat from the quay. 

The lime kilns near the entrance 

I took a photo of the map of the museum to guide us around

Looking over the water towards Enkhuizen town.  We didn’t get time to see the town itself.

A row of cottages

And inside one of them. Look at the different tiles around the hearth and chimney breast.

Of course there was a windmill, two photos taken (not two windmills).

We were there just for the morning as the ship sailed in the large lakes to get to Rotterdam for the next day. There we had a guided walk about part of the city.

The old harbour, with the White Huis based on buildings in America and the first high rise building in Europe. It was the first to have an elevator and electric light.  Below another innovation, the Cube houses, designed by Piet Blom and here’s a link about them.

Behind is block of apartments called The Pencil and you can guess why! Because the city was bombed severely during the Second World War a lot of the building are modern.  After the morning in Rotterdam it was off to Kinderdijk in the afternoon. This is a World Heritage site and it was very busy with visitors.

The windmills are for pumping water, not for grinding grain and each has a small reservoir for pumping out water. As you can see there’s a series of them, each was run by a family who lived in cramped conditions.  

This was a recreation of the living area and like most Dutch houses there are cupboards inbuilt for their precious objects.

I’m going to stop here to upload and there’ll be lots of tulip pictures from Keukenhof soon.