Bike/Barge part five

It is our final day on the bike tour. We rode the last 34 miles back to Amsterdam. One picture is from a lunch stop at a windmill outdoor museum. There were three windmills that were performing different activities: pressing seeds for oil, sawing wood and crushing gypsum into powder. Many windmills are also used to pump water out of lake areas to keep them from getting flooded. During our ride, we ended up taking a small ferry with a chain and a hand crank across a canal. There is a picture of June, our Italian member of the group, cranking away to get the second half of the group from one bank to the other. The third picture is of our farewell dinner on the boat. It has been a great week and we have made some fine, new friends! The last picture is just a pretty one from earlier in the trip.

Bike/Barge part four

I missed a day because of no wifi access in small town where we harbored for the night. Tonight we are in Alkmaar, home of the largest cheese market in Holland. However, I do not plan to talk about that. Suffice to say, the city is big enough for me to find wifi. The group rode down the west coast of Northern Holland , which has a long, tall dyke to protect the Holland from the rising sea. It is cement armored and slopes up from the sea in such a way that people have a wide, even, path on which to walk or bicycle. Anne and I went to each side of the path and took a picture of each other to give you an idea of the size of the dyke. As we cycled south, the path disappeared into a water mirage, just like a road does when you are driving a car in the desert. Three of the pictures are of riding on the dyke.
After riding down the coast, we went inland and rode for a while through the old dyke, which now has a forest growing on it. However, it is essentially sand dunes, so there are swaths of sand showing through the forest floor. The last picture is of me riding through the old dyke forest. At the end of the ride, Anne took a fall but only got some scrapes. All in all, it was a good day.

Bike/Barge part three

We woke up to another rainy day and our tour group was not very enthusiastic about the bicycle ride. Jacob smartly suggested a tour in the morning at a local museum called Enkhuizen, then hope for sun in the afternoon. The museum has some fine old boats in it but also an outside tour through a recreated traditional Dutch fishing village. Wandering from house to house, you see people doing tasks/occupations that were the mainstays of a functioning village of the nineteenth century: blacksmith at the forge, a man working on a ship sail, another man smoking fish (from whom I bought a smoked eel), an apothecary and a fishing net maker. I have a picture of several carved heads that were the symbol for an apothecary—a man sticking out his tongue, saying “aahhh”. I also have picture of me practicing milking a fake goat. Anne is pictured in front of one of the wooden boats, which looks like it has a big fin on the side. This is one of the standard boats used around here. It is a shallow barge with dagger board on each side instead of a keel. Most of the water inside of Holland has been created by building dykes or dams around the land masses to keep the fresh water in and the salt water out. The water is never very deep Later on, the sun came out and we had a wonderful ride over one of the many dykes, heading north toward a series of islands that provided a jumping-off point for the seventeenth century Dutch traders . We passed water and pasture that was teeming with babies of every kind: goats, sheep, birds and cows. We see pictures like this on products that we buy in the United States but know that most cows and chickens are fed corn in giant warehouse or feedlot. What we see in Holland is the “real deal”—and the food tastes like it! . By the way, I want to give a shout out to our tour organization, Cycletours: we are getting a great tour, nice accommodations and wonderful meals.

Bike/Barge part two

Today I have some early morning pictures from Volendam. This is good because it rained most of the day during our ride. Volendam is an interesting city in that 1) it is the only Catholic community in Northern Holland and 2) it has produced many pop music stars and its high school sports teams compete at the highest level, even if it is a small population. It is also a thriving fishing community and I took a picture of a statue of an old fisherman wearing wooden shoes. Our guide had no explanation for this combination of demographic peculiarities. One of my pictures is just pretty, the other shows a water reflection of the Catholic church in town—make of it what you will. Our bicycle ride today took us through Edam, home of the world famous cheese. This cheese tastes quite different than the Edam cheese that shows up in our American grocery stores. Anne and I will be bringing home a small round of their goat cheese. I took a picture of Anne at the cheese market, helping out with moving the milk containers.

Bike/Barge part one

Anne and I walked our luggage over to the barge yesterday to drop it off and then spend a few hours of down time in the Amsterdam library that is on the wharf. It is a beautiful, modern library with a nice café (at which I got two latte macchiatos). Anne took a great shot of the Amsterdam harbor from the steps of the library. We took a ride with our new tour to get acquainted with our bikes and bicycling tour protocol. We have fourteen people in the group, three of whom are primarily French-speaking; the rest are English-speaking. Our guide, Jacob, grew up in Holland and knows a little bit of lots of languages. Everyone has done a good job of trying to help Jacob, and each other, with the communications. The other pictures I have are of: our barge with the bicycles on the adjoining ramp, our bicycle ride to our current location (Volendam) and me trying strike up a conversation with some lambs (I was unsuccessful). FYI, one of my readers asked for the price in Holland. It is the equivalent of $10.00 a gallon. So, no whining, you Americans!

Amsterdam, part four

This is our last full day in Amsterdam. Anne and went to the Van Gogh museum in the morning to try and get the jump on the crowds. We rented the audio tour devices and I am especially glad we did because there there has been a fairly recent examination of letters written by van Gogh to relatives and friends that shed a lot more light on his thoughts about his art and his general state of mind throughout his artistic career. Van Gogh was much more than a "crazy artist that committed suicide". He often described many of his paintings in progress in letters to his brother, as it was his brother that financially supported him and marketed his paintings. He also seemed to have a good understanding of his mood swings and found some ways to manage them. This made the art much more enjoyable for me, as I not necessarily a big fan of his style.
After the museum tour, Anne and I picked up some souvenirs and took a leisurely walk back to the hotel. We spotted some sculpted iguanas in one of the parks and Anne took a picture of me getting to know one of them. We also saw a large size chess game going on in one of the squares, so that is another picture. A third is of a "floating garden" that we saw on one of the canals. Lastly, one is of Anne's dinner last night: "wilde Zeebaars". See if you can figure that one out! We are probably going to have to get better at our Dutch in the next week because we will be biking out in the more rural areas.

Amsterdam, part three

The Ritjkmuseum had several Vermeers and Rembrandts and was not so crowded that we were not able to get up close and personal. There were also many other Dutch artists of the same time period that I never heard of that had a wide variety of styles. I especially enjoyed the home life scenes of children being deloused, fighting among themselves or trying to get the cat to dance on its hind legs while the cat was yowling its head off, which caused the dog to bark and an adult to start shushing them. Sorry, no pics (per usual). We went to the Dutch Resistance museum in the afternoon, which reviewed creative ways that Dutch people frustrated their German occupiers from completely taking over Amsterdam and making use of their labor and resources to further their cause during WW II. There were also many thought-provoking questions asked about what caused some people to resist and many to not do so. On a lighter note, there were some very technologically advanced bathrooms at the museum that had all clear, glass stall walls--until you stepped into them and locked the door. Then, the walls would turn opaque. I am posting more beautiful flower garden and canal pictures provided by Anne today, since the museums were so stingy about allowing photos.

Amsterdam, part two

We got up brought and early to take a tour bus to Keukenhof flowerfields, where you can see fields of tulips and many other spring flowers in bloom. They also ship seeds and bulbs all over the world. The gardens are designed to accommodate and entertain large numbers of tourists. Anne and I got on the English speaking bus, which was one of several other buses of different tongues with the same destination. Most of the tulips were already gone from the surrounding fields, but they were still beautiful and brilliant in the garden, along with many other flowers. The grounds were well designed, with fountains, streams, art work and petting zoos. There was also a pipe organ playing peppy polka tunes that got our toes a tappin'. My pictures (except for one) are focused on art work in the gardens. After we returned to Amsterdam, we went to the Hendrikje Museum of Bags and Purses. This was my choice but Anne also enjoyed the visit. It was a historical review of the development of "reticules" from the 1600s to present time. Later on, we had dinner and then went to a ceremony in the square by the Queen's Palace to honor the military fallen for Remembrance Day. The church bells rang at 8:00 pm and all Dutch residents paused in whatever they were doing for two minutes of silence to pay their respects. It was quite moving. Tomorrow, the partying will begin with Liberation Day. Anne and I will be off to the Rijksmuseum to see art work by Vermeer and other Dutch greats.

Amsterdam, part one

When Anne and I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday we were overwhelmed with the transition from a small, quiet town to a big city. We bravely started our Rick Steve's walking tour, then gave up and retreated to our hotel room after dinner. Today we started out with a tour of Anne Frank's house and had a marvelous time. The tours takes you through the whole house, with video recordings, written materials and displays of the setup of the house throughout the tour. There were also quotes from her diary throughout the tour that greatly enhanced the experience. Anne and I were both crying by the end of it because it was so touching. I have a picture of one of the postcards that we purchased from the museum store. Then we had a fine lunch and went on a cruise of the canals. There are nine canals in widening concentric circles (actually more pentagonish) that make up the structure of the city. During the cruise, weended up sitting next to the only Dutch people on the boat. We had a nice discussion with father of this family about water management in Holland, as his wife is an engineer who specializes in water management. I also asked them, and the later the hotel manager, about the wooden shoes. I did not see anyone wearing them--they were only sold as souvenirs. I was informed that the wooden shoes were originally worn as mud shoes because nothing was paved so the Dutch had to constantly walk through mud. These days,some of the farmers still wear them but Anyway, I am including a picture of the canal, a large bike storage area that sits near the train station, and a picture of a crowd at a square listening to a wonderful singer (notice the cute child in the foreground in the bicycle cart, dressed in a ladybug coat).

Bruges, last day

Anne and I started the day by going to the Groeninge Museum to look at some fine art by primitive Flemish artists (meaning, ones of the fourteenth century that were in process of developing three-dimensional perspective). I love Flemish/Dutch art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century because of its rich detail and presentation of ordinary people as just as interesting as wealthy, politically powerful people. I am looking forward to seeing more in Amsterdam. Bruges was celebrating Labor Day today by having many marching bands and lots of beer drinking. Anne and I layed low and went for a quiet dinner at an Italian restaurant. The pictures today are of the ever beautiful canal, plus one of bicycle art--I just can't help myself!