Into the land of clogs and windmills

At Lauwersoog on the North Sea coast we locked into the first of many inland water ways reclaimed by the Dutch from the sea. ‘God made the earth and then the Dutch made Holland’ it has been said and how true it is with 26% of its area and 20% of its people below sea level, the lowest being a staggering 21’ below sea level!

Where every other lock in the world takes you up to go inland, the first thing we noticed in the lock was that we were going down. What a beautiful place we entered. It was a two day passage along the canals to cut off the north west corner of Holland (more correctly called the Netherlands, Holland  in fact covers only two of 7 of the Dutch counties).

Windmills (some that still worked but only for show), Dutch barges, pretty houses with the traditional stepped and decorated Dutch gables and flowers everywhere and the best part of all was the people. The first windmill we visited was just being set up. The head of the mill has to be rotated to face into wind; this is done by hand buy rotating by hand a large wheel which dragged the head round on its chains, hard graft for this old fellow!

We took a little detour to ride along the edge of the dyke that kept every bodies feet dry. Despite a good look we found no little boys with their fingers in the dykes - I think they have cracked the engineering now!

Navigation? This is my kind of navigation (once you have got your head round the spelling of some of the place names!)











And as for the biking, well this is of course the land of bicycles but how about this for a cycle path? You could land a jet on it - it even has median lines!! That is the dyke to the right.

Holland is known to be flat; well, it really is, completely flat!

The first day in the canal, with a warm following easterly wind, we had a lovely sail through many small villages to the old port town (10 miles as the crow flies from the sea) of Leeuwarden with the Netherlands answer to the leaning tower of Pisa.  

Fortunately buildings took a while to go up in the 16^th century.  Three years into building the tower which was started in 1529 the foundations started to sink into the somewhat waterlogged ground. Building was stopped before being restarted several decades later in an attempt to straighten the tower giving it this rather crooked look. The tower now leans 5’ out of vertical; its not as much as its famous counterpart in Italy but that’s not a bad effort! To really see the lean you have to look at the granite ledge running round the tower a few feet above the ground.

The many bridges on the canal all opened on demand.


















We paid our fees to this nice fellow who swung a clog on the end of a line into which you put a few Euros - very quaint!

Another days travel on the canal on a very blustery day took us back to the North sea coast at Harlingen where I said goodbye to Chris to continue his travels round Europe. An old university friend, Nigel Morris joins me for the next leg to Amsterdam.