Planes, Trains, Boats, and Automobiles!

Saturday, March 31, 2018 ~ Kinderdijk Windmills It was an early morning stroll through this UNESCO World Heritage Site.  A series of windmills line the canal standing at the ready to pump the water into the canal and eventually back to the sea.   Kinderdijk (kinder dike) is a village in the Netherlands province known as South Holland about 9 miles from Rotterdam.  It is situated in a polder, or a low-lying tract of land reclaimed from a body of water by the construction of dikes roughly parallel to the shoreline followed by draining the area in between the dikes and the natural coast.  Kinderdijk is located at the confluence of the Noord and Lek rivers.  The system of nineteen windmills was built around 1740, and is the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands.  They were designated a UNCESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. This map shows the location of Kinderdijk We left our ship at 8:30 a.m. under the watchful eyes of...

Thursday - Friday, March 29 and 30 ~ Getting There is Exhausting! We left Bethany and Jeremy's house in Somerville at about 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, experiencing our first Uber ride to Logan Airport.  Getting through security was fairly simple, and we spent an hour with a glass of wine (beer for Jeff) and playing Backgammon (Jeff beat me twice).  Then a stroll to our gate where we took turns "power walking" through our gate area.  We boarded our Lufthansa plane at about 4:30 p.m. and were in the air promptly at 5 p.m.  At some point during the night, a passenger experienced some sort of medical emergency.  He or she was taken from the plane first before the rest of us could disembark in Frankfurt.  We had a couple of hours layover in Frankfurt, that actually ended up being longer because the crew had been delayed and then the woman sitting next to me had a panic attack and decided that she could not fly.  So, we waited a good half hour while the air...