Sunday: September 29
Kinderdijk, A Good Day to Bike
I slept like the dead last night. Apparently Amy got up a number of times, but I slept through it.
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Breakfast was the good usual. I went with my usual omelet. We were scheduled for the windmill tour at 8:30. We were at breakfast at 7, so we had plenty of time.
When we showed up to bike, there was a bit of a SNAFU. We were not scheduled for the bike tour, but rather for one of the walking tours. Fortunately, they could send us on the bike tour, which ballooned from 3 to 6 people. That was good because we had a fairly clear blue sky, which was going to be rather unusual for this trip. It would have been unfortunate if we missed the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine.
We biked along the canal between two sets of windmills. The bike was a two-edged sword. We covered more ground and was just inherently fun, but it was rather difficult or impossible to take pictures while biking (although Amy tried, and tried a few times). If we had been by ourselves, I would have stopped more often to get pictures, but not with the group.
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I wore my red fleece jacket and soft-shell pants. Walking to the bike place, I thought I was overdressed, but with the wind from biking, I was fine. My fingers got slightly cool, but overall I was fine. The biking was effortless with the ebikes set to high, and the bike path perfectly level.
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We did stop a few times, and the guide talked about the windmills and canal system. Not surprisingly, the river is tidal, and they only dump the water into the river at low tide.
We went along the canals a bit, and then turned and biked through some of the farm country. Being Sunday morning, it was time for church. It was rather strange seeing people, dressed up nicely for church, riding bicycles to get to church.
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We eventually ended up at the oldest windmill, where we got a look inside the small interior. The windmills still work, and while they aren’t used normally to pump water, they are available if the power fails. Families live in them and maintain them, and apparently there is a 14-year waiting list of people wanting to do so. Our guide said that there was at some point a family of 13 living in that windmill, which would have been rather cramped.
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Apparently the windmills can turn with no sails, two sails, or four sails, or half sails depending on the wind conditions. When we were leaving the mill, the miller was in the process of setting the second of two partial sails.
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Apparently the most efficient pumps for moving a large amount of water up a fairly short distance (e.g. 2 meters) is an Archimedes Screw. Next to the bike shop, at the end of the canal, there was the modern pump station, that had several large screws moving water out of the canal.
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We were supposed to be back on the boat by 10:30 at the latest, and it was 10:22, so I dashed back and got some pictures of the screws. I wouldn’t have minded spending an hour wandering around, but there wasn’t time. I got back on board at 10:30 on the dot. By the time I got to our room and was taking off my coat, we were already undocked and starting to move up the river.
I am now in the bow of the boat, writing this up, and taking advantage of the apparently very rare September sunshine. Again, I think in the future, it would be much better to go on a cruise during the summer (June through August, maybe late May) when the weather is warmer and probably sunnier. We really lucked out with the weather today. It would have been a lot less pleasant if it had been overcast, and downright miserable if it had been drizzling or worse.
We are now sailing up the river Lek, which is a side river from the Rhine. There is nothing scheduled until lunch. We’re scheduled for a wheelhouse tour at 2. This is the day to enjoy being on the cruise outside. I’m sitting at the very bow, where there is some protection from the wind, sipping a coffee, and munching on a stroopwafel.
They have an interesting style of tugboat. The wheelhouse is on a telescoping tower. If they are pushing a barge with a low cargo, the wheelhouse is down. But if they are pushing something tall, like a barge full of containers, they can raise the wheelhouse up 20-25 feet (with a long staircase to get to it) so that they can see over the top of the cargo.
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I was doing my daily wordle, and after two guesses I had determined that it was RI_ER. I decided to go with fate and try RIVER, seeing as how I was literally sailing up a river at this very moment. Unfortunately, that was wrong. It ended up being RIDER.
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To mis-quote the Beatle’s song: There Goes the Sun...
I really wasn’t that hungry at lunch time, so I had a soup, salad, and chocolate mousse. After lunch, we had a wheelhouse tour. I had gone on one on an earlier trip, but this was Amy’s first time. One neat thing was that he demoed the wheelhouse retraction. It seems that the when the wheelhouse gets to the bottom of its travel, there is still a foot or two sticking up, so that you can just see out over the deck. To make it flush with the deck, you can then lower the wheelhouse roof, so that you have to either sit or bend over.
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When we got back to the room, I felt rather sleepy, so I laid down for about a half hour give or take. When I got up, I saw that our sunny blue sky was gone, and we were back to solid overcast. Earlier, our guide had told us how lucky we were and how rare it was to have a sunny blue sky in the Netherlands in September.
I took a shower, which was a welcome relief after a day of travel. Now, we are about to go up to an afternoon tea.
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We attended a presentation about the upcoming optional excursions that still had openings (trying to drum up more business). It ended up working, because afterwards Amy and I signed up for the Vienna evening concert (Mozart and Strauss).
I felt like I needed some exercise, so I went up to the sun deck to do laps. Even though it was now overcast, I thought that my red fleece jacket would be too much, so I wore my Gore-Tex raincoat as a wind shell. That proved to be just right.
However, as I went up, I saw that we were in the process of docking. This rather surprised me, as I didn’t think we were stopping before Cologne. I saw an interesting sculpture on the shore, so I ran down and grabbed my camera. It looked like a wolf with a person standing next to it. The strange part is that the person looked like they were wearing a scuba mask or something like that.
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Shortly thereafter, we undocked and proceeded on the way. I was chatting with another couple, and they said that they saw someone coming on board, so apparently we stopped to pick them up. I was wondering if someone had missed the boat at Kinderdijk, but they said that person (or persons?) had luggage with them. My guess is that they missed their flight and arrived late.
Then I put my camera back, went back up to the sun deck, and started doing laps. According the sign, it was 12 and some change laps per mile. I ended up doing a brisk walk for just over a mile.
Now we are in the nightly briefing about the events for tomorrow (the “port talk”), and then there is dinner.
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Dinner was nice, although I keep feeling like I’m eating too much. We sat with a very nice family from Scotland. The daughter and her husband were now living in New Zealand. We had a very pleasant conversation with them. Dinner lasted two hours, and it didn’t seem that long.
Tomorrow is Cologne. We have the free walking tour in the morning, and then another optional walking tour, with the high point of the tour being literally the top of one of the cathedral towers