Amsterdam

There was no blog for yesterday as we really did nothing tour wise during the day. The weather was terrible and it rained heavily all day. We were to go to Cologne on tour, but…..due to the fact that repair work was scheduled to close the River to traffic for a couple of days, we had to miss Cologne and steam full speed ahead to get the Amsterdam side of the bridge before work started. However, we did stop in at a small town to let people who REALLY wanted to go to Cologne (4 1/2 trip in the rain, all up) get off and catch the bus which was provided by Avalon. We then picked these people up again further upstream. We ended up making it to Amsterdam last night around 9 pm.

Today the sun is shining and it has been quite hot really. This morning we all had a Canal Tour which was very interesting.  We actually found the little place where we stayed some 37 years ago when we had 2 nights here with the kids in 1977. The Eureka Hotel, if you might remember, kids. There are certainly some canals to travel down and the number of houseboats which are homes to families has grown heaps since we were here. They all have their little gardens and some have sun rooms, mostly they look quite comfortable.  We then paid a visit to the Gassan Diamond factory.  This was interesting, we saw the craftsmen perfecting the facets of the diamonds, and had the process explained to us, then were given a look at some beautiful diamonds without their settings…lovely.

After lunch we embarked on a tour to a Traditional Windmill Village called Zaanse Schans.  This place was some ½ hour out of Amsterdam and was an open air village with its typical Dutch houses, a number of windmills, cheese makers and clogs makers, as well as craft stalls, of course.  We actually went inside a windmill and had the workings explained to us. This particular Windmill processes chalk for making artists paints, and you were able to climb up to under the ‘sails’ for views over the nearby water and fields. The Clog making was amazing.  They use a machine with a principle similar to a key cutting machine and the new piece of wood is shaped by the shape of the neighbouring clog. This is then taken out of that machine and shaped in another one to finish it off….all taking around 5-6 minutes to make a clog. We have our last night on board tonight, so packing needs to be finished before we go to bed. We are having an extra 2 nights in Amsterdam before we join our next bus trip in 3 days time. Hoping the weather stays nice for the next 3 weeks.