There's No Place Like Home

Please permit me the pleasure of introducing to you Rita van Wesep and Els Feiken.  On Tuesday we got on an intercity train heading north out of Rotterdam.  In Amersfoort we changed to a smaller "stop (because it stops at the smaller places) train" which took us to the village of Nunspeet.  Neither Els and Rita nor Nancy and I knew what the other twosome looked like, but we agreed we would all look for a couple of older, grey-haired (and in our case, slightly confused) people.  It all worked perfectly.  From the moment we saw them on the train station platform we felt at home, and that feeling only intensified over the days we stayed with them.  Like Aad and Anja, Rita and Els were unfailingly kind and gracious.  In their case the feeling of belonging was increased by the fact that they and we are family.

Ah yes, family.  Just what is the relationship between Rita van Wesep and Gerard van Wesep?  Here you see Rita and Nancy poring over the family tree created by one Isak van Wesep, son of David van Wesep and Grietje Pet.  David, in turn, was the brother of Rita's father Marius who was the nephew of my great-grandfather Hermanus who emigrated to the United States and sired all the U. S. van Weseps.

Here Els is offering some assistance.

There were many Izaks in Rita's family.  Here is her brother Isak.  He was active in the Dutch underground during the German occupation and was betrayed.  He died in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

So, we had a great deal to talk about.

Once we were finished with the family tree, talk turned to other things.  It turns out that both Els and Nancy love to knit.  That gave them much more to talk about.

The next morning they were still at it.

Rita and Els have a seemingly endless reservoir of good humor and good will.  They love to travel.  And they love to eat and drink well.  If we weren't talking and laughing while walking and exploring we were talking and laughing while having coffee or having lunch.  Regardless of what ever else we might be doing, we were talking, and we were having a wonderful time.  After a wonderful lunch (which followed the equally wonderful breakfast) we went to the small fortress city of Elburg.  You see the city plan in the photo below.  It's one of the few old towns platted with the streets rectilinear to each other.  There are pieces of the old wall remaining and the water surrounds it.  If you consult a map you'll see that Elburg was originally (before the Zuider Zee became the Ijssel Meer) on the sea and was a defense against attack from the sea.

The town was charming and the weather, true to form so far, hot and sunny.

Here's a bit of that wall.

These shoes have the names of mom, dad, and the kids.

People have organized to preserve the old fishing boats, the botters.  Here a couple are going out for a cruise.

Rita's pretending she was bad.  Hard to imagine.

We stopped for something to drink where we could watch the boats.

And then resumed our stroll through the town.

These houses are built against the wall.  You can see the wall above the roofs.  I think you might be able to get a table into one, but might have a problem with the chairs.

This path goes along the dike.

Here we're sitting on an old well

where we can look out over the countryside, dotted with cows.

Just inside the wall is the St. Nicolaaskerk.

Next to the church is the former convent, now little houses.  Miracle of miracles, look who lives in the first house!  True, it's van Wezep instead of van Wesep.  But, close enough.

Just down the street from the church we found a wonderful restaurant where we had a great dinner.

Then on to home and a good night's sleep.

Catch Up Time

It's 10:45 p.m. (22:45 as they write but not say over here) on Thursday evening, and I'm desperately behind on this blog.  It's the downside of actually doing things.  This is our last night with Rita and Els whom you haven't yet met.  Tomorrow we go to Maastricht.  Better get to typing.

I last posted on Sunday afternoon.  Once done with that we set off for a stroll.  I had in mind to see a certain statue, a heart rending cubist work by Ossip Zadkine.  He created it after seeing Rotterdam with its center destroyed by German bombs.  It depicts a man missing his heart and crying to heaven.  It's titled "The Destroyed City".

But on the way we went to the Euromast, and the first thing we saw was this.

That girl hanging in the air had come from up there.

These are the guys who make sure you don't get killed getting from there to here.

Here comes someone else.

And someone else.  You get the picture.

We went up to the observation deck.

Here where the flying people came from.

There goes another one.

We stayed put.

There's actually an elevator that goes from the restaurant/observation deck to the very top of the mast.  It rotates as it goes up and down.  I made a cool 360 degree panorama, but Google declined to accept it.  So, in lieu of that here's a view of the beautiful park next to the tower with the shadow of the tower falling over it.

And here's the park itself.

We walked on, still trying to find the statue.  I actually asked at a hotel reception desk where the cubist statue is.  At least, that's what I thought I asked, but the girl at the desk thought I was looking for the cubist houses, and that's where we ended up.  You've seen these before, but not so up close and personal.

No statue.  We went to a restaurant to ask again and discovered we had walked right by it a few blocks back.  I had been trying to find it before nightfall, but decided that wasn't going to happen and we should rather settle for some beer and dinner.

The only reason we were where we were was because of a statue that wasn't there, but it was actually a pretty nice spot so it all worked out.  We ate dinner, and night fell.

We started walking back

Suddenly, there it was.  The man with his heart torn out.  "The Destroyed City".

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The next day we met Aad and Anja in the Coolhaven Metro station.  They would take us to Dordrecht, where they once lived, and to Kinderdijk, the town of windmills and a UNESCO World Heritage site.  In the tunnel at the station is a photo of the St. Lawrence Church, Rotterdam's central church, destroyed during the bombing.

We took the metro to the water bus.

After a seemingly endless stream of bikes came off, we could get on and be on our way to Dordrecht.

We passed the Erasmus bridge

and the Willemsbrug.

We passed ship building companies

and an office building that looked like a ship.

Finally, Dordrecht.  Dordrecht is the oldest city in the Netherlands, having been granted city rights in 1220.

This street is named "Horseshoe street".  Why there are sheep on the building I don't know.

The "Big Head's Gate".  More not knowing on my part as far as the name is concerned, but it's a very handsome gate.

You see how that second building is leaning out?

This man is trying to push it back.  God bless him in his labors.

Some random photos.

I liked this Frank Zappa quote.  You'll have to make it bigger to see whether you also like it.

The buildings you see to the left in this photo form one side of the square where men first plotted to free the Netherlands from Spain.  Also, William of Orange once lived here.  When he did the place was called Prinsenhof.  As you know from my earlier post, he and his wife and zillion children later moved to Delft.  So then THAT place (the one in Delft) was named Prinsenhof and this square in Dordrecht was demoted to just plain Hof, as you can see from the sign.

This road leads from the old square to a very large new square where we eventually stopped for lunch.

On the way to lunch we stopped to look at this sanctuary for poor people.  There seem to be quite a few of these places, making me think that perhaps the Netherlands, in the Renaissance at least, was one of the better places to be poor.

There's a well in the center.

Here's my artsy well wheel shot.

And here we are having lunch.

Soon we were off again.  We literally had miles to go before we would sleep.  We saw tunnels,

doors one couldn't get to,

little buildings,

big buildings,

statues,

and, finally, de grote kerk, the big church.  It's Protestant, of course.  Reformed, no less.  Makes me feel right at home.

From there we walked to the river

and followed it back to the harbor and the Big Head's Gate.

We caught the water taxi with about a minute to spare and took it to where we could catch a smaller water taxi

which we took to Kinderdijk.  We walked from the ferry dock along the dike to the windmills.  The fronts of these houses are at the level of the dike.  The backs, as you can see, are one story lower.

The river level is somewhere in between.

Here's why those houses are dry.  This is the current pumping station.

And here are what used to keep them dry.

This pumping station was an intermediate step in the keeping dry process.  It was placed in service beginning in 1868, first with steam then with electricity.

And here are the windmills.

This is the one open for visitors.

When you get up close and personal, they are huge -- very impressive structures.  To get the sails to catch the wind canvas is unrolled.

The top part of the mill is rotated to catch the wind by this mechanism.

Aad and I weren't actually turning it.

It's difficult to convey the impression the mill made on me.  The wind was blowing, and the sails made a "whomp, whomp, whomp" sound as they spun around with tremendous force.  They swept down nearly to the ground.  If you were to walk in front of one you would surely be killed.  There was a low, plastic mesh barrier to suggest you not do that.

We went inside to see, on the first two floors, how the miller and his family lived.

On the top floor we saw the moving machinery

and a pretty nice view.

We watched the miller brake the mill and then take the canvas off the sails.

Once the canvas was off and the sails securely braked I could photograph the water wheel which was the point of the whole thing.

This was all very fascinating.  Unfortunately, Aad had only left us about ten minutes to make the twenty minute walk back to the water taxi dock to catch the last little taxi that would take us to the big taxi.  Needless to say, we didn't make it.  But, undaunted and ever inventive, we walked onto the car ferry and took it across the river.

Once there we walked to the bus stop

where we caught the bus to Capelle aan den Ijssel where Aad and Anja live just outside Rotterdam.  We got back sooner than if we had done it the way Aad had originally planned.  Go figure!

Aad and Anja yet again had us to dinner.  They have been extraordinarily kind to us.  The last photo is one from the bus window.  It's of the storm surge barrier on the Ijssel very close to where Aad and Anja live.  This is a part of the Delta Project about which I wrote earlier.  You can't be here for long without realizing the constant menace of the sea.  The Dutch have lived with that menace for centuries.  They can never relax.  They are never truly safe.

But now it's time for me to try to relax and get some sleep.  Tomorrow we leave Rita and Els, whom you've not yet even met, and head for Maastricht.