Marcie's Big Adventure - Day 16/2nd Day in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Hi Everyone,

I had been so proud of myself for remembering, about a week before leaving on the trip, that would need to get buy something in order to utilize my curling iron in Amsterdam, since they use a different current and plug than we do. I'm not so proud any more - after plugging my unit into their outlet and plugging in and turning on my curling iron in the bathroom, I went into the bedroom to start getting ready. Wasn't too long when I smelled something like smoke. Went into the bathroom and realized that I had purchased an adapter, not a converter and my curling iron was smoking! Thank goodness I smelled it before it became a fire. Then I went off for my tour. Got there with plenty of time before they opened. I think our driver may have been a bit new at driving a big bus. Before we left the parking lot, she had taken down limbs from 3 different trees. She took out a sign leaving the parking lot although after she back off of it, it did bounce back about 45 degrees. The next and last sign didn’t fair so well. She mowed over it really well and it didn’t move a bit after she got the bus off it. Good thing it was a fairly short ride. Lots of adventure first thing in the morning. On the canal cruise through the country, we saw little clusters of homes and only 1 small town. The Netherlands is below sea level. One reason canals are important is to get to a part of the agricultural fields. A lot of the trip took us by old peat fields that by the time they could no longer be used for peat are well below the sea level of the canals so berms had to be built to prevent the canals from running over and down. Knowing what the water levels are and when to have the windmills run to remove the water is so important that there are more than 35,000 water monitors within the country. Most of the windmills we saw were stone or brick, unpainted. However, there were mills that were painted in red and some that were painted in blue. That was done by the miller who built and ran that particular mill. He painted it to show that he was Catholic or Protestant. The Keukenhof Gardens has a massive piece of real estate and that is just for their show gardens and parking lots. There are so many displays, most of which are very large and only get bigger. Am not sure any of my pictures captured the beauty of it. There were beautiful displays everywhere. I did a ton of walking trying not to miss anything. I would have loved to have seen an arial view looking down at everything. I did get a couple of postcards that show multiple displays from the air. Tulip season is pretty much just the month of April. This year, due to all the cold and rain, the growing season got delayed. Probably in another couple weeks, the country sides will be gorgeous. By the time I left there, I was pretty tired. When the bus got me back to Amsterdam, about an hour later, I’d found some energy and decided to walk around looking to sit out in the sun and have a glass of wine. It was still in the low 40’s for temperature but in the sun it was very nice. The area where I stayed there were lots of restaurants and bars. It was the perfect section of Amsterdam to stay in. Well, that time of day with the buildings being so tall and streets so narrow, no one had their outdoor seating in the sun. When I was walking over a canal, I noticed that one of the canal cruise boats with no roof (most have roofs) had bottles of liquor and wine set up in it so I bought myself a boat ride and glass of wine and off we went into the sun! The houses in the old section are very narrow and very tall. The reason is that way back when these houses were being built, the taxes were based on the width of the front of the house. Some houses were not much more than the width of the front door and its doorjamb. In this area, several friends had gotten together to build their houses next to each other and bought a large plot of land and designed their houses to be pie slice shaped. The tiny point of the pie was the width of the front of the house but inside it immediately went into a large wedge like a piece of pie would. Clever! Also, there are places where these homes are badly tilting sideways, frontways or to the back. That’s because when they were built the wood posts used to put into the ground turned out not to be as long as they should have been. It very clear these houses are leaning but no one cares and they’re occupied. We went down one canal where the homes were all worth over $30 Million. The skipper said that very few are owned by residents. Due to the cost, when one goes up for sale, it is usually a company that buys it and uses it for the business. No advertising signs are allowed so it still looks like a beautiful residential neighborhood. A wonderful day in a beautiful city! Hugs

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