Thursday Our first day without any rain! It was a beautiful ride through the countryside and several small villages. The one we stopped in for a break had a very active shopping area with lots of cafés, clothing stores, gift shops, grocery stores and, of course, bicycles everywhere. We had the ever-present quest for bathrooms; this time Marjan directed us to a cafe with free facilities. One of our stops was to the last of three large steam engines that were developed in the mid 1800's to drain land areas between Leiden, Haarlem and Amsterdam to prevent flooding and allow for connecting of the areas. It is now a museum as more modern technologies have taken over. At the time this was a huge improvement from dozens of windmills that had previously been relied upon to
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