Oct 12, 2011

I’ve decided throughout the tour I’ll give a bit of a commentary (or dot points) of our day and add some pictures taken throughout the day (may be a few, may be many).



More challenges in the foundation department in Amsterdam

After a comfortable night’s sleep moored at the dock in Amsterdam we headed off after breakfast to do a Canal tour which was very picturesque even in the constant rain we had. Apparently over 200 days a year are wet and raining in the Netherlands. We returned to the coach after that and headed to the floating flower market where we ogled at the incredible bulbs and other fresh flowers….and lots of tourist paraphernalia and Christmas decorations in abundance before we had a coffee and returned to the coach. We enjoyed the tour guides commentary throughout and marvelled at the information of the 1953 massive floods in the Zealand region (where many of our Dutch friends came from) to hear that 1,800 people had died in one night and a third of the land had been washed away in the region. Makes it easy to understand why people would make the decision to come to Australia for a new start!



Classic Holland shot of one of the windmills responsible for draining the land

We continued our coach tour from there until our return to the Amaverde well along the canal and boarded around 1pm just in time to line up for passage through our first lock which was an interesting experience and shortly after that we had an emergency evacuation drill and thankfully they changed the place of the mustering station from the sundeck to the lounge since it was still raining.



In the old parts of Amsterdam there were canals and bridges everywhere!

After that we had a PowerPoint overview of what is coming up on our tour as we marvelled at some of the commercial barges which whistled by with incredible loads on them from all sorts of gravel, sand and coal (the highest tonnage I saw noted on a barge was well over 3,500) to containers and even one with new cars which Norm estimates would have held well over 100 semi loads of them....at a conservative estimate. Between the briefing and the rain we have yet to get any photos of them so hopefully will manage some before we get away from the commercial centres.



The welcome on our 'internal balcony' on arrival yesterday afternoon