After a really cruisey eight-hour bus trip, we took a local train to our apartment in the the very cute town of Zaandam which was in fact about 10 kms from Amsterdam. After settling in, we wandered along the canal in the pedestrianised centre and patted ourselves on the backs for choosing to stay outside of Amsterdam. We’d be doing this a fair bit over the next four days. Zaandam was a great place to stay.
The next day, we ubered the short distance to Zaanse Schans, an incredibly interesting and picturesque living museum which taught us all about the Dutch Golden Age and how the area was one of the world’s first industrialised areas. By the mid-17th century there were nearly a thousand windmills in the region which were utilised for a variety of functions, such as flour mills, hemp mills, oil mills, paint mills, and lumber mills. We decided to split up and Paul and Ollie checked out a lumber mill and Elliot and I visited a paint and dye mill. Both were so fascinating to visit and to learn about how the mills operated before steam engines and electricity. While at Zaanse Schans we also got to try our hand at weaving hemp into sail cloth, taste heaps of cheese and learn how barrels and clogs were traditionally made.
The next day we took the train into Amsterdam. We spent the early part of the day wandering around the city and eating cones of chips. In the afternoon, we boarded a fun canal cruise where the boys made friends with some kids from the US, and Paul and I learned some really cool things about the city. For instance, people paid taxes according to the width of their house and number of windows, and we saw one house that was only about a metre wide! We also learned that if a house was painted black, then the inhabitants had suffered from the plague. Once black, it has to stay black.
After the tour, we had dinner and then visited the amazing museum at Anne Frank’s house. Despite visiting here fifteen years ago, I was once again brought to tears by the fact that the Jews suffered so horribly and so thankful for Anne and the way she has touched the world while telling her horrific story.
It poured down with rain the next day so we opted for a lazy day at the apartment watching the National Geographic channel, eating food from a vending machine style fast food joint under our apartment, and catching up on our blogs.
We rented bikes from Zaanse Schans on our last day in Holland and did an incredible bike trip through the countryside and beautiful villages along the canals. We stumbled upon a cool playground where the boys could pull themselves along on a raft out to an island.
That evening we boarded our overnight ferry to Newcastle. Our Commodore-class room wasn’t quite the luxury I was hoping for, but sailing was very smooth and the kids had a great time dancing and doing the scavenger hunt so I really can’t complain.
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