On Saturday, August 27 we went to Kinderdijk to see the 19 windmills there. Getting to it was an adventure. John called his Mom the night beforehand to have her look up directions for us on the internet since we did not have a computer until John started work the following Thursday. We received general directions from Amsterdam and figured we would be OK.
We took the train to Rotterdam Centraal, asked for directions again there, and were told to get on yet another train. Then we waited with several other people for the bus to Kinderdijk. We almost got on a bus going the wrong direction, but luckily the couple in front of us asked the driver if this was the correct bus and discovered it wasn't. We didn't know about stamping our train ticket on our first train trip, so the conductor got mad at us--but not mad enough to make us pay the €30 fee, whew! An American in the next seat helped us figure out what to do at the next stop to avoid another chastising.
Kinderdijk was cool; we got to go inside a windmill. People still live inside windmills! Besides the mills, we saw an earthworm, chicks and a mother hen, goats, sheep, horses, cows, and a frog who jumped out on the footpath next to us. We walked into the town (Aldersdam, we think?) and stopped to watch a soccer game--looked like high school or college-aged guys. We then watied for the bus again for about 45 minutes! While waiting we witnessed a family from Italy in a winnebago drive up to the entrance to the windmills across the street, look puzzled, hold up traffic while doing a U-turn (on a timy street in a winnebago!), then drive back and forth and back and forth, each time the man craning his neck to figure out where to see the windmills. The whole lot of us waiting for the bus was quite entertained! Erin realized how confusing the entrance to the windmills is, though. The "Kinderdijk" sign had an "X" marked through it, as did every other sign (though she couldn't tell you what any of the signs meant other than a lot of stuff is prohibited). Speaking of signs, just as the bus drove up we noticed a sign warning that "dogs can't poop here". Yup, it was an actual sign with a silhouet of a dog squatting next to a big pile of poop! We'll have to find another sign like that and get a better picture. This is the one we got (see beginning of entry.) Oh--Erin cracked up over that one!
We only had a slight mishap on the trainride home. They made us get off the train in Haarlem because a suspicious package had been spotted at Amsterdam Centraal (where we were going). It was quite confusing as all the announcements were in Dutch. You can tell who the foreigners are in these instances. One Dutch woman started telling a passenger what was going on in English, and as she began to speak about 20 people from all over the platform congregated to hear what she had to say, us included! Apparently it was really a false alarm because we were only stalled about 20 minutes before we took a train on another platform. We ate dinner at a really good Italian place (LaModonna) in the Centrum. It was a fun day. We love being out in the country, in smaller towns.
As an aside, there are actually fields of flowers here, grown to harvest and sell. It's so pretty and green.
No comments:
Post a Comment