Not All Picturesque

When we left the very fancy marina at Kortgene, we headed through Middleburg to Vlissingen (pronounced Fleshingen) to a much less fancy marina.  On the way we passed this empty looking hotel.  Although "bad" is the word for "bath" in Dutch and may be an appealing marketing strategy for nationals, we wondered if the name might be putting off the foreign tourists.


Overall, the Netherlands was beautiful and looks like a great place to live.  Not everything is picturesque, mind you.  At Vlissingen (pronounced Fleshingen) we had a bit of a hike to get to the grocery store and found ourselves walking through a neighborhood that might be described as a little rough around the edges.  Fortunately, this was more than compensated for by the clubhouse at the marina that served wine, beer and excellent French fries. 

From Vlissingen we had to cross an inlet of the North Sea.  This was eventful only for the first fifteen minutes or so, starting from the moment when the sea started rushing into the locks as we were motoring out.  We had timed our departure so that we would be riding with the incoming tide which eventually worked to our advantage but got us off to a bit of a rocky start.

From Vlissingen, we crossed to Terneuzen, another industrial town where we stayed just one night.  Then it was off down the Terneuzen-Ghent canal and into Belgium.  This is a very significant commercial canal for the city of Ghent, taking all their manufactured goods out to the North Sea and wherever they go after that.  As a result, our first impression of Belgium was not quite what you see in the tourist brochures!  

Taste of the High Seas

We left Dordrect Tuesday morning at about 11 am in the spitting rain.  Our goal was to move as far to the south west as possible, near to where we will cross into Belgium, so we intended to put in a good eight hours or so.  Of course, we also intended to leave at 8 in the morning...(note that the sun sets very late here, and the girls rarely get to sleep before 10, hence, the 8 am start is unlikely, if not impossible).  In any case, most of the day's motoring was pretty dull.  Tom is still keen on looking at every shipyard, shipping dock, barge and yacht we pass, but we girls have moved on.  Emily and Georgia spent much of the day designing houses on their IPads while I read a completely pointless novel.  Which was all well and fine until the excitement began.  We had to cross a large stretch of open water and we had our first taste of the high seas.  I had been starting to wonder why a boat like this one would be made with 3/4 inch lips around all the horizontal surfaces.  I guess it was about five o'clock when we were taking five foot waves (I say eight, Tom says four) on the side, making the boat roll like mad.  Everything lose slid back and forth, including Georgia, who was asleep on the leather bench at that point.  If I hadn't been holding her back, she'd have landed on the floor with quite a rude awakening.  I don't think you can really get the feel of it, but we've included a little bit of video taken on Tom's blackberry.

Needless to say, by the time we docked at 6:30 or so, we were all pretty wiped out, so we've stayed put today, enjoying good internet access and a playground for the girls. 

From Amsterdam to Dordrecht



A Sampling of Ships on the North Sea Canal

We left Amsterdam on Sunday morning.  We visited only one museum during our stay, and didn't even manage to get into the Anne Frank house, as we unknowingly wound up in the city on a national holiday weekend.  However, we expect to be back when we sell our boat next year, so we will plan for other excursions then.  


Leaving Amsterdam the girls became absorbed in books on their IPads.  They showed very little interest in the number and variety of ships we passed on the North Sea Canal, but there were many.   In addition to the big ship from St. John's Newfoundland we crossed paths with multiple barges carrying heavy loads, the hovercraft that runs people up and down the river, and an out of commission submarine.  Needless to say, Tom was in boatbuilder heaven.

 

At home in Haarlem

After an hour or so we took a left turn down a smaller canal, heading toward Haarlem.  In Haarlem we found cheap docking on the canal in the centre of the city, an IKEA a 15 minute bike ride away, an amazing 500 year old church complete with a fabulous organ that Mozart played on when he was ten years old, the Corrie Ten Boom museum (see “The Hiding Place” by Corrie Ten Boom), and tiny little pancakes called poffertjies (spelling is questionable).   We also outfitted the girls’ bicycles with saddlebags (for Emily, so she can help transport groceries) and a basket attached with a beeootiful string of plastic flowers (so Georgia can do her part).   We are enjoying our boat, but we are deeply in love with our bicycles!


The organ played by Mozart



14th century church in Haarlem

Town square at Gouda

On Wednesday, we left Haarlem heading for Gouda, city of cheese.  Again, we tied up in the city, a nice spot to be but without internet, as we had been in Haarlem.  This is a minor stressor for the girls, who do much of their school work on the internet but a more significant problem for Tom, who needs internet to communicate with work.  While Emily and I explored the old town on foot, Tom put Georgia on the back of his bicycle and set off to find a McDonald’s, international source of free internet.  They found McFlurries while Emily and I found a town square, old churches, a windmill, a cheese store, and a maze of cobblestone streets. 


Gouda was a lovely old city, but not a major destination for us, so we took off again Thursday morning.  Our goal on this day was to make it all the way to the city of Gorinchem (inexplicably pronounced Horkum with a lot of back of the throat “ch”) where Tom had arranged meetings with a couple of people from a boatyard that he was involved with about ten years ago.  We put in a full 9 hour day of motoring and encountered all kinds of bridges and a few locks, all accompanied with crystal clear operating instructions in Dutch.  This is what we’ve figured out:  if there’s a red button, press it; if there’s an intercom looking thing, talk into it, starting with an apology for not speaking Dutch – when you get a response, hope that the translation is that the bridge will open shortly; if there’s a phone number, call it, a VHF radio chanel, radio it; when a live person opens the bridge and holds a wooden clog at the end of a stick down over the boat, put a 5 euro note in.  It was always a bit of a relief to come upon either tall bridges that we could go under without needing it lifted, or an automatic bridge that worked via some kind of invisible sensors. 

 Although it rained much of the day, we enjoyed the quiet canals we were on and particularly liked to see the striped fields of flowers.  We now have dozens of photos of windmills as I felt the need to take a photo each time we passed in the hopes of eventually taking the ultimate windmill photo.

 

 

 

Thursday evening, we landed in the town of Gorinchem, tying up again on the canal in the centre of town.  In this case it still provided no internet access, but there was conveniently located laundry and we had the opportunity to watch the dragon boat teams practice up and down the canal.  Tom spent some of Friday touring the Damen shipyard (builders of very many very big boats) and we were treated to fine dining in the evening by the fellow whom Tom had dealt with many years ago when Damen and Metalcraft were looking at a joint venture.  The girls were particularly struck by the portion sizes (small) and time spans between courses (long).  All in all, dinner took nearly four hours, unheard of for North Americans!

 

Saturday morning we headed to Dordrecht where we are still, partly because it is such a great place to dock, and partly because internet is available.  This is our last big city in the Netherlands.  When we leave, we are heading into Belgium, where we will spend just a few days on our way to the coast of France.  Then we will wait ‘til the conditions are right for the big crossing to England.  We’ll be sure to post on the blog again when we’ve conquered the English Chanel.

Hamsterdam

We have been in Amsterdam for five days. On the first full day that we were in Amsterdam, we bought a family ticket for a canal cruise tour thing. The ticket lasted for 24 hours so we could be on the boat until Friday at 11. In Amsterdam, the three main things we wanted to see were the marine museum, the Anne Frank House and NEMO. In five days we have only managed to see the marine museum. Anyway, on the first day, we got on to the canal boat and started on our commantarried tour. There was Dutch, French, German and English. We stayed on the boat until we got to a restaurant that we wanted to have lunch at (it was a hop on hop off kind of thing). On the boat we met a couple from the United States. My dad had a long conversation with them. The restaurant that we had lunch at was called the Pannenkeuken Huiz which was (you guessed it) a place where they sold pancakes. I had the things called poffortjes (the J sounds like a Y) with strawberries, whipped cream and powdered sugar. After that we walked around a little waiting for the next boat. Georgia started getting very grumpy. I can’t really remember what we did after that so we couldn’t have done anything to significant. Oh well, there was one thing. We stopped at one of the stops called the dapper market hoping to go to the market. Unfortunately, we had forgotten that it was a holiday (don’t ask me what holiday!), so the market was not open. Dad had not wanted to go to the market, but he saw a boat museum, so he went to that. When we saw that there was no market, we decided to find dad so that we could get back to the boat in time. My dad has a friend in Kingston who is Dutch. He has a son who lives in Amsterdam. Dad had been trying to get in touch with the guys son (whose name is Friso), so that they could meet. Apparently, when my dad was going through the gates a guy drove up and my dad helped him open the gates. They talked for a bit and then realized that they had been emailing each other recently. Things happened and before we knew it, we had plans to go on a personal tour on Friso’s boat guided by him. The next day it was cold and windy but we still went out on our tour. In Amsterdam, we have seen three giant cruise ships. We went past two of them on our little tour. After that we went to home. I will write more on a different day.

This is a picture taken on our personal tour with Friso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JEMILYJ is excited to have started our trip

A Week's Worth of Towns, by Carolyn

At the end of our first day of motoring we'd got as far as Lemmer, a destination chosen by Tom because of the giant steam operated pumping station located there.  This is the oldest steam pumping station in the Netherlands, and is still used several times a year when all the more modern stations are working at full capacity.  Since a large part of the Netherlands lies below sea level, the water controller people have to pump water back out to the sea whenever there is too much rain.

The pumping station, of course, was a pretty industrial event and it was located just a short bike ride from our fairly ugly marina.  We were surprised, then, when we cycled a bit further to get into town and found that it was really cute - restaurants with patios at the edge of the streets and canals full of boats. 

Boats on the canal in Lemmer

We left Lemmur after a day and headed across the lake (used to be an inlet of the North Sea, but the enterprising Dutch built a giant dyke, pumped all the seawater out, and turned it into a lake) to the town of Enkhuizen.  Now, due to the passion/fixation/single minded obsession of my spouse, our vacations tend to lead to places with lots of boats.  But I have never seen so many sailing ships in one place in my life.  The photo doesn't really capture the number of boats. 

Here we stayed two nights at a marina beside the train station.  We explored the town (again, cute canals full of boats, restaurants with patios, charming shopping street) and spent a morning at a museum similar to Upper Canada Village but all about Dutch fishing life in the late 1800 and early 1900s.  The girls painted wooden clogs and dutch tiles but were disappointed that the bakery wasn't operational. 

After Enkhuizen we landed at Edam, home of the famous cheese.  There wasn't too much to this town, but we found a bakery where we bought the most wonderous dessert by accident.  It's called boterkoeken (butter cake) and is basically a very moist shortbread cookie made in a small pie pan.  What a great idea! 

After Enkhuizen, most people would go to Vollendam, an old fishing town that caters to tourists, but Tom had a notion that the boatbuilding scenery would be better in Monnickendam, and I wasn't sufficiently on the ball to redirect him.  I don't even have a picture of Monnickendam, it was so unremarkable, but we did a side trip to Marken, an old fishing village turned tourist destination on an island. 

Finally, on Wednesday we left Monnickendam and landed in Amsterdam, the big city.  We've now had five nights here and in addition to one day on the boat during the rain, we've been all over the city by boat, on foot and by bicycle.  We spent today, Mother's Day, at the Maritime Museum (mother's choice) but have decided to leave the Anne Frank Museum, Nemo science centre, and Rijksmuseum for our visit when we end our European adventure. 

 

For me, the real highlight of Amsterdam occurred when Tom packed all our dirty laundry into the saddle bags on his bike, cycled to the Laundromat and came back a couple of hours later with clean clothes!  I'm rapidly becoming a convert of a car free life!

First Day Out

After three weeks in Sneek (seventeen days in rental cottages and now six days on the boat) we have finally set out for our grand adventure.  Today, after fussing about with the requisite last minute fuel up, ATM run, boatyard consult and bakery haul (perfectly brilliant sausage rolls and hazelnootbols), we set out for the town of Lemer.  Shortly after leaving our safe harbour we found ourselves on a canal running behind a giant barge and in front of a giant barge.  Fortunately, Tom handles the boat very well.  He's also smart enough not to let on to any of us (mostly me) when he's nervous (note that he was able to present the same calm facade when we found ourselves driving through a maze of definitely-buses-and-bicycles-only-you-stupid-tourist streets in the middle of a busy Dutch city following our IKEA shopping adventure - I'd have parked the car in the middle of the street and run screaming in a panic).
 

In our two hour journey we passed multiple working barges, many pleasure vessels (middle of the day on a Thursday when it's only ten degrees out?!), a selection of small windmills and a few fields of cows. 

 

We have landed at a marina outside Lemer, where we hope to tour a giant steam pumping station tomorrow.  Not necessarily fascinating to all, but the station is responsible for keeping this part of the Netherlands dry.  This event may comprise the bulk of the children's science education for the next few months.  This, in addition to the seeds in a can that we will grow on the boat, that is.  The marina doesn't seem particularly special and, sadly, we couldn't treat ourselves to a meal in the restaurant, as it cost us 12 euros (about 15 dollars) do do two loads of laundry.  Yikes.  We may regret not buying the boat with the washing machine.

 

So far the boat is working well as a home.  It has everything we need, and very little that we don't.  We had a very snappy bicycle shopping adventure last week, and Tom has figured out how to strap all the vehicles to the boat.  Check out Georgia's great pink bike!!  Cycling here is quite an adventure for foreigners such as ourselves, but I'll let Georgia tell about that.