Thursday 28 May 2009

Netherlands - Kinderdjik

After our morning in Delft we drove out into the countryside to Kinderdjik, which is one of those places with windmills on canals that you see on postcards of the Netherlands.

Windmills are of course one of the icons of the Netherlands, along with Canals, Cheese, Tulips and Bikes, and we were keen get started on ticking each of those boxes!

It was pretty exciting to see windmills in action - although you do see a surprising number of them strewn about the country-side, not many of them are operational. I can't say that I'd thought about it much, but I didn't realise before that the windmills were mostly built to drain the water from the low-lying countryside, a job that has been passed on to steam and then diesel power.

It was quite interesting to climb around inside the windmills and see them up close, but we'd taken longer than expected to get to Kinderdjik and we didn't want to hang around too much - we had more windmills later in our itinerary!

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