Day 8 - "The Windmilling"
Today we began our day with breakfast at the hotel. On this trip, breakfast in our hotel is becoming a sort of necessity, as we are not spending too much time in each city. Also...have you ever met a coffee-less Jessi? Not good! (This is Jessi: He's not lying! Jessi without coffee is a recipe for a disaster-day! We don't want that!)
We left the hotel and walked to the Maas river and took more pictures of the Willem Bridge and the Erasmus bridge as well as the de Boeg merchant marine memorial. The merchant marine memorial contains a ship, flanked by large angular constructions that form an anchor when viewed from the front. When the memorial was built, it was criticized heavily for lacking a human element. So the artist returned to the memorial and added a sculpture of sailors just to the side of it. They are bound in rope and depict a man steering the ship, 3 sailors, and a drowned man. In our morning adventures, we realized that it was going to be a cold and windy day! The wind was whipping hard and I (Jessi) realized that my poor ears were going to need some protection. We stopped at Markthal one last time for a "to-go" lunch from a Lebanese shop and visited a merchant where I bought a scarf to wrap around my ears for the day. It is probably the best 7 Euros I have ever spent! My ears were so happy in the wind!
We continue to be stunned by the dazzling architecture of Rotterdam. Walking around and looking at these buildings was the highlight of the city. Our path of exploration took us back into town and over to the maritime museum, where, outside, they have a model of a functional port with cranes on tracks and shipping containers. Rotterdam is one of the largest ports in the Netherlands along with the Hague. We ambled back to the hotel, gave our luggage to the handler, hopped on our bikes, and bid Rotterdam a beautiful adieu as we rolled over the mighty Willem Bridge and the Maas river. On our way out of Rotterdam, we saw some amazing things, including a beautiful mosque, and the stadium (Soccer - aka REAL Football) ;-P . We also spotted this really neat piece of art underneath one of the bridges along the Maas, which made it look like the drab gray concrete pillars of the bridge were curtains to be pulled aside to reveal Deflt Blauw tiles. A part of our route out of the city included the 2010 Tour-De-France route, as indicated by yellow paint on the ground! It was fun to ride along that way and feel the breeze in our faces and know we were in the footsteps of the great racers!
This ride was F-L-A-T. By the time we reached our big stop, neither of us could register that we had gone 10 miles! We took a ferry to Kinderdijk where Josh managed to completely surprise me with the absolute and complete beauty before us! I had left much of the planning of the stops up to him for this trip, only asking for stops in Rotterdam and Alkmaar and that we bike around the Ijslmeer. The stop in Kinderdijk wasn't on our "map" and I had no idea it was coming. The absolutely beauty of this UNESCO world heritage site cannot really be adequately explained. The Dutch reclaimed this land through ingenuity, using 19 windmills to pump water out of the polder and into a reservoir in order to keep the land from continuously flooding. The Dutch are MASTER ENGINEERS. There are windmills as far as the eye can see and they are simply beautiful. It was especially fun to be there on a very windy day because they were making a loud "woooooshing" noise as they turned - performing their function perfectly. We slowed to a near crawl on the bikes because the path was crowded with tourists. This stop was the highlight of my trip so far! Complete beauty and exactly what I thought we would find in The Netherlands. After we had enjoyed our exploration, we had a short bike ride to a second ferry stop which took us to Lekkerkerk. From there it was just a short 15 miles to Gouda.
Gouda is a beautiful but small town! We are staying in a very new Best Western! The hotel clerk offered a room with a bath tub which yours truly jumped at! A chance to soak muscles after 100 miles of biking? Yup! Bring it on! We explored the town square where there is a lovely church, a gorgeous town hall, and the building that holds the cheese scale for weighing the cheese (Goudse Waag). That's right. There's a building that contains a scale that was once used to officially weigh Gouda cheese! Now it is a cheese museum. Unfortunately, with the exploring we did in Rotterdam in the morning and the lengthy stop in Kinderdijk, we arrived in Gouda after all the tourist locations had closed for the day. We enjoyed our walking tour and wound down our night with a lovely 3 course meal at a piano bar in the town square. We walked along the canals of the old city back to the hotel and settled in for the night.
Fun linguistic fact: the cheese you call Gouda, does indeed come from this town BUT the English pronunciation of the name is way off. In Dutch the "G" is more like a soft "ch" as in the German "Ich" ("I") or the hebraic pronunciation of the hard "h's" in Hannukah. So, "Gouda" sounds more like "ch-oww-da."
A quick note about biking here. It is amazing. A long part of our trip involved biking on a one lane road that is used for two-way traffic. On each side of the road are two designated lanes for bike traffic. In the middle is a lane for car traffic. We were on this stretch of road for miles and I was constantly amazed that the Dutch drivers exhibited such courtesy. When a vehicle approached from the opposite direction, they patiently pulled aside and let them pass before continuing on. If they needed to follow behind me, on the bike, for a time before they could safely pass, they did so patiently and at an appropriate distance. Nobody honked or seemed at all upset that the bikes were in the way. It is a completely different way of life and I am in awe.
Our next day's travel are to the larger city of Utrecht! Onward (Voorwaarts)!
