Equipo Williams

I’ll pretty much go to any museum or heritage site.  I’m also the type of person who wants to read every sign so I go slowly.  My kids are starting to react with suspicion anytime I suggest a museum, and the phrase “UNESCO Heritage site” is greeted with at best eye rolls.

After the night train from Innsbruck to Amsterdam we had about two full days before we were expected in Belgium.  On the train into Amsterdam Centraal Station we had spotted an old sailing ship moored in the harbor, so we locked up our luggage in a locker and headed out on in the general direction I thought it was in.  It turned out to be the Amsterdam, a reconstruction of a ship made for the Dutch East India company and it was moored at the Dutch Maritime Museum.  The kids had a good time climbing around the ship.  The museum didn’t shy away from the darker side of Dutch Colonialism which let us sneak in some teaching as well. 

We didn’t really want to stay in Amsterdam so we took the train to Delft.  It’s a much smaller town with canals and a beautiful town square.  It’s also the home of Vermeer and the burial place of Leeuwanhoek, but the kids felt that we’d done enough learning for one day and voted for pizza and ice-cream instead. I did sneak in one final piece of culture: my parents have a reproduction of Vermeer’s “The Little Street” hanging in a bathroom in their house (I don’t think it’s the original, although it would be a nice surprise if it was!) along with an article about the actual location. I’ve read the article so many times that I felt I had to go (“we have come all this way” being another catch-phrase of mine the children are starting to fear).

The next morning I had found the Kinderdijk Windmill site outside of Rotterdam, but without a car we had to go the fun way: train to Rotterdam, streetcar down to the harbor, and then boat to the museum.  The site has 19 windmills dating from the 18^th century, which are kept in functional order.  They were originally installed to pump out the area for land reclamation and in addition to showing how the windmill operated it also explained how the whole system worked.  What they didn’t explain was who exactly got the idea to start reclaiming land in the first place: the amount of infrastructure is so significant that it’s not clear how you start out.

At this point it was mid-day and Audrey was insisting in that charming way that aggrieved tweens do that it was time to go to Belgium to see her cousins and grandparents again, so back to the boat and then on to the trains to De Haan.