Our Final Day

 


We got up early today to take advantage of an amazing opportunity. We left on our bikes at 6:30 to cycle 5 km to the Holland Flower auction building. It was an experience that is difficult to describe. This building is over a km long. We got to walk on an upper level catwalk and look down to the warehouse floor to watch the workers coming and going on forklifts with palettes of fresh flowers. Everyday millions of fresh flowers are brought  in to be auctioned off to buyers via the internet. Then they are immediately shipped out on trucks or flown to other parts of the world. Many of our flowers at home come from here. We had an hour to watch the process, a once in a lifetime experience!

We cycled back to find that our boat was not at the dock but sitting off shore!  Excuse me???  We were relieved when they came back over to the dock to pick us up!

We had our breakfast and at 9:30 we left Kudelstaart for our final bike ride!

It was a sunny but cold and windy day!  However, we actually went ten days without rain!!

We only had to go 19 km. We cycled alongside the airport for awhile and then into the Amsterdam Forest. This is a beautiful area near Amsterdam where people can go to get out of the city. 

We stopped for lunch at a goat farm geared for young children. It was fun to watch all of the little kids. 

We did our final ride, arriving back to the boat at 12:30.  Rikko’s group stopped for a refreshment so they didn’t get back until 1:30!

We will spend a few hours cruising into Amsterdam and have our farewell dinner on the boat tonight.  I will write about it tomorrow.  Now it is party time! 




















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

That’s a Wrap!

Image
  When I left off yesterday we had arrived back in the boat, having finished our final bike ride.  The ship departed at 1:30, headed for Amsterdam.  It felt great to sit back and relax and watch the world go by.  We got in a few good card games to pass the afternoon.  We arrived into Amsterdam at 4:00 pm, it was a beautiful afternoon.  Some people took the opportunity to start checking out Amsterdam.  We were parked near the cruise docks so we felt pretty dwarfed next to the giant ships. At 6:30 we were served an amazing 4 course farewell dinner.  There were a few short speeches from the staff.  At 9:00 our captain, Jano , came with a canal boat and took us on a 2 hour canal tour through the city.  It was lovely but we were all very tired by the time we returned to the boat. This morning we had one final breakfast and then said our goodbyes to the QV and staff.  We left at 9:00 and walked down the street to the Movenpick hotel. ...
Read more

Blow Wind Blow!

Image
  When we started out today it was    cool, cloudy and very windy!    It is tough to get motivated on a day like this but at least it wasn’t raining! We cycled 9 km to the Inundation museum, which is housed in 4 caissons that were originally used to restore the dikes after the flood of 1953.     We spent 1.5 hours at the museum and we could have used more time. It was very interesting and well done.    It was heartbreaking to read and see videos about the devastation that took place as a result of the storm. This is a piece of history that most of us had never heard about.  We cycled a lot along the shore of the island Schouwen, grateful that the strong winds were mostly at our side.  We stopped for lunch at a fishing village with a restaurant that served fresh oysters, clams, pickled herring and fish and chips. Then we cycled across to the island of south Holland. Shortly after lunch we pulled in briefly to a  spot w...
Read more