Maybe not quite like that, but we did spend time focusing on rivers. Our first stop was a the Princess Beatrix Locks:
It reminded me of good times spent in Ballard, only minus the trip to Archie McPhee's afterward. We learned that the captain of this barge has a pretty nice steering set-up:
Look at that, he even has a plant!
Sadly, soon the barge and our vans parted ways, with the barge going right as we went left:
We also spotted some aliens looming in the distance:
Actually, those are visor dams, and they look like this:
Water management, folks. It's all about the water management.
We took a small detour in our drive along the river and stopped in the town of Wijk bij Duurstede for a quick look around. I was struck by how quiet the town was, and then I remembered it was 10:30 on a Saturday morning. I'm usually pretty quiet at that time, too! There was a castle:
A windmill:
And a church or two:
It was a beautiful place! Then it was back in the car and off to the--
oh, wait. Detour first. It was important to get a picture of Andrew Dykhuis in front of a dijkhuis. Time out!
Then it was off to the hills! What's this, you say? Hills in the Netherlands? It will get weirder, people. It will get weirder.
Look at that elevation change!
We went up and over the hills, drove for a while, and then arrived in the Veluwe! The Veluwa is a forest/nature preserve -- a man-made one, but still a forest. It felt like we had been transported to Colorado.
Prof. Aay explains it all:
We trekked through the forest and found...this???
The Veluwe is home to the "Sahara of Europe." Really, are we still in the Netherlands?
We had an excellent time roaming around the park for about an hour. Here, "nature preserve" means you can go basically wherever you want. Some of us ended up using the free time to take advantage of the dunes' photographic potential:
We also have about 100 pictures of our (mostly failed) attempts at building a human pyramid, but thankfully those are not on my camera so I am not obliged to post them all here :)
Then it was off to a river near Zwolle to learn about the "Room for Rivers" project, which does things to prevent/minimize flooding. Where we went, they had dug an extra channel for water to escape into when flooding occurred. Our guide (although he knew more English than I know Dutch) gave his lecture in Dutch and Prof. Aay translated.
What, you would like to know what that sounded like? Good, because I took a video just for that purpose!
We walked along the river dike, went over a sluice, and then hung out in a field with some cows:
The cows had a good life, and they did not mind us intruding on their field at all.
Then it was time to head back to Amsterdam, all of us a little bit older and a little bit wiser. It was a successful day!
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