Rotterdam

I admit it. Holland, the Netherlands, windmills, Belgium, polders, Dutch, dykes, tulips, who's the Queen? It's all very confusing to those of us Americans who are weak on geography and misspent our youth in the Pacific and Far East rather than the Atlantic and Europe.

OK, so Google says Belgium and Holland are not part of the Netherlands and Netherlands means “low country:. Amsterdam and Rotterdam are the main cities along with The Hague. Dutch is a language as in the expression ...”It's all Dutch to me.” and also a demonym (name used for the people who inhabit a region) .

 Dutch is the main language and Rotterdam is the largest port in the world. The current monarch is probably not a Queen whose name is Wilhelm Alexander. The government is a unitary parliament constitutional monarchy.

We first hit the Museum Park which has three fine museums. Due to time constraints we only visit the museum of Natural History which is compact, interesting and well-organized.

 Next we attempt to locate a small Dutch pub on Gaffenstaat but are foiled by a strange street numbering system. We make our way to the third objective (the train station) and enjoy the rest rooms, coffee, wifi and a chocolate chip cookie.

 I learn that the Trip Adviser App allows one to download entire cities for walking around convenience. That is the hopefully the end of my map problems. ( I dislike the words "hack" and "app" very much...hackneyed IMHO)

 Rotterdam has stunning architecture. It reminds us of Chicago with one amazing structure after another. The Allies can take some credit for that since they bombed Rotterdam into rubble in sort of an early urban renewal plan.

 The main hazards of Rotterdam and Amsterdam are being run down by bikes.

We make our way to see the Kubus houses which were built in 1984 and the nearby amazing Marthal Market which opened this year.

 We lose our map somewhere near the old harbor but eventually wander around for about an hour and find the Dutch pub where Mrs Phred wants to eat.

Back at the boat, I discover that I've lost my passport somewhere during our seven hour wander in Rotterdam. I call the pub on Skype and find that they have it. Time is running out on the ship departure si I grab a cab and arrive at the pub at 9 PM only to find it locked and shuttered. I bank on the window and the cleaning crew hands me the passport. I arrive back at the ship before it sails....a little excitement...I've always had what you might call sloppy good luck...its better than no luck or even bad luck...

Polders, Dikes and Windmills

Kinderdijk, The Netherlands

"A polder is a low-lying tract of land enclosed by embankments known as dikes, that forms an artificial hydrological entity, meaning it has no connection with outside water other than through manually-operated devices. "

New Orleans is probably a good example of an American polder. I can't wait to use this word in scrabble.

There are seventeen very old windmills clustered around this Dutch polder.


Most of the windmills in Holland are now only monuments now that attract tourists from around the globe . We did spot a few turning, here and there Nowadays, they mostly use big diesels when the water needs to be pumped out of a polder.

There are, however, a great many wind turbines that produce up to 3 megawatts of power each when the wind is not too strong or too weak. Wind turbines produce about 6 percent of the countries total power needs.

Amsterdam and Tulips

Goodbye, Koninginnedag... Hello. Raleigh

On our last day of the river cruise, they offer a tour of tulip gardens.

I need to score some euros for the taxi ride the next day, so I send Mrs. Phred on the tulip tour with the camera while I walk the Amsterdam waterfront searching for an ATM.

Looks like we slept right though the Koninginnedag celebration (above image from Wiki).

It's really hard to imagine how bicycle friendly the Netherlands can be. There are bicycle paths everywhere and you I really got paranoid about walking across the red brick bike paths. They don't slow down for pedestrians or red lights and if there is a collision between a bike and a pedestrian it is always the pedestrian at fault. There must be a million bikes chained to bridges in Amsterdam. A $15,000 Toyota costs $45,000 here and gas is $10 a gallon.

Mrs. Phred comes back with a nice collection of posies pix.

Yesterday was Koninginnedag or "Queen's Day". It involves a lot of drinking and the color orange. The cleaning crews are out early dealing with broken glass and mounds of litter on the bridges and in the canals.

My eyes seem to be old and tired. I don't get so excited about exotic locales these days....maybe I should do more push ups?

The taxi ride to the airport is 50 euros. The taxi is a BMW and the driver has a suit, leather driving gloves and a shaved head with black stubble like the guy in the movie, "Transporter".

I found an interesting book for the flight back and finished it just as we touched down in North Carolina. The protagonist is ignoring his wife and having Internet sex chats with men pretending they are women. The antagonist is an evil doctor who is killing and kidnapping women he finds online so he can transplant their pineal glands....they don't make heroes or villains like they used to....but it beat staring out the window for twelve hours.

Looks like a big front and lots of rain moving though today.

On the long flight over, I gave up my bulkhead seat to some young parents who were dealing with a one-year old on their laps. Hopefully, somewhere there is a ledger of good and evil deeds being kept....For apathy you get more purgatory days...

Operation Market Garden

Arnhem, the Netherlands

You may recall the 1970s movie, "A Bridge too Far"? On Monday we went to see the Canadian cemetery at Oosterbeek near Arnhem and the War Museum.
Uncle Bruce made his second landing here as a pilot of a Waco Glider. The first was in Normandy a few months earlier. He crashed and injured his back when a jeep he was transporting burst through the fabric of the cargo compartment. The WACO could carry a howitzer or a jeep or 14 airborne troops. It was a "million dollar" wound.


About 20,000 American and 10,000 Commonwealth soldiers parachuted in or landed in gliders. The bridge at Arnhem would have shortened the war by six months, had it been captured and held.


Unfortunately, two unexpected Divisions of Armored Panzers were resting up near Arnhem and the lightly armed British and Americans were badly outclassed by the German defenders.

I remember Uncle Bruce had very little love for the SS troops, who, he told me, had a nasty habit of machine-gunning inconvenient prisoners.

Here's some Wiki background:

In World War II, during Operation Market Garden (September 1944), the British 1st Airborne Division and the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade were given the task of securing the bridge at Arnhem.

The units were parachuted and glider-landed into the area on 17 September and later. The bulk of the force was dropped rather far from the bridge and never met their objective. A small force of British 1st Airborne managed to make their way as far as the bridge but was unable to secure both sides. The Allied troops encountered stiff resistance from the German 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions, which had been stationed in and around the city.

The British force at the bridge eventually surrendered on 21 September, and a full withdrawal of the remaining forces was made on 26 September. These events were dramatized in the 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far. (The bridge scenes in the movie were shot in Deventer, where a similar bridge over the IJssel was available, as the area around Arnhem bridge had changed too much to represent WWII era Arnhem). As a tribute, the rebuilt bridge was renamed 'John Frost-bridge' after the commander of the paratroopers. The current bridge is the third almost-identical bridge built at the same spot. The Dutch Army destroyed the first bridge when the Germans invaded Holland in 1940. The second bridge was destroyed by the US Army Air Forces shortly after the 1944 battle.

A second battle of Arnhem took place in April 1945 when the city was liberated by I Canadian Corps of the First Canadian Army.

Owing to the Allied withdrawal, the vast majority of their dead had to be left on the battlefield. Here they were buried in simple field graves (some little more than their own slit trenches) or in small mass graves dug by the Germans. Kate Ter Horst, whose house was used as a first aid post during the battle, found the graves of 57 men in her garden when she returned after the war. After Arnhem was liberated in April 1945, Grave Registration Units of the British 2nd Army moved into the area and began to locate the Allied dead.

A small field north of Oosterbeek was offered on perpetual loan by the Netherlands government to the Imperial War Graves Commission in June 1945 and the dead were reburied there. Many of those killed during Arnhem's liberation were also buried at the same site. The cemetery was completed in February 1946, originally with the graves marked by metal crosses, although these were replaced by headstones in 1952. Most of the German dead were buried in the SS Heroes Cemetery near Arnhem after the battle, but reburied in Ysselsteyn after the war.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records 1759 graves in the cemetery as of 2004. 1432 of these are Commonwealth, including British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealanders. The cemetery is also the last resting place of 73 Polish soldiers, (many of them exhumed and moved from Driel, to the disappointment of Driel's residents)and 8 Dutch civilians - some killed in the fighting and some former Commission employees. 253 of the graves are unidentified.

As of 2003 there were still 138 Allied men with no known grave in the area, and they are commemorated at the Groesbeek Memorial. However, evidence of the battle is often discovered even today, and the bodies of Allied servicemen are reinterred at the Airborne Cemetery. When found, bodies are exhumed and Dutch Graves Registration staff attempt to identify them before they are reburied.

Cape Horn Was Invented Here

Hoorn, The Netherlands

Hoorn is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of Noord Holland.

The Netherlands have 12 provinces. Two of them are North and South Holland (kind of like North and South Dakota without the buffalo).

We should see Belgium in a day or two. The tulips are blooming.

Cape Horn, the most southerly point of the Americas, was named after the town by Willem Schouten, who rounded it in 1616.

What's Blue Got to Do With It?

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Drugs aren't really legal here. However, they may have wisely decided that the battle is not worth the effort and do not enforce what laws there are.


Therefore the smell of weed is pervasive. There are 1600 "coffeehouses" in Amsterdam that sell a little something extra with the coffee...

Mrs. Phred makes me laugh sometimes. I'm focused on the last page of a mystery novel and she asks, "Do I look good in blue?" I burst out laughing at the question.

My internet connection on the boat is very weak.

Maybe I'm sharing the bandwidth with too many others.

I am frustrated failing to load pictures. More later. After midnight?



Ok...Back in the US...here are a few Amsterdam Pix....The food and company on the Riverboat were great...definitely and old folks game....the halt and the lame were pervasive...

The Volcanic Clouds Have Parted

RDU Airport....High Noon



Our Flight to Detroit and then on to Amsterdam is good to go. Happy we didn't waste money on trip insurance. They aren't paying anyway, claiming natural disaster....read the fine print, SUCKA! Breakfast at the airport was oysters Rockefeller and a goat cheese, onion and strawberry salad. It feels funny to be on vacation again and watch the suits with their laptops and blackberries....

I got new books in the airport by Tim Dorsey, Lee Child and Michael Connelly for the long flight. Maybe we'll get a hotel room in the red-light district over a hashish den before the river cruise starts on Friday.