Cruising Day 1

Today we went to Rotterdam.  After a buffet breakfast, we attended a presentation about Windmills and Polders.  A polder is reclaimed land from the sea.  Through a long process, the water is pumped away and the land dried and used to live on.  There is a lot of polder land in the Netherlands.  

Windmills are an essential part of the Dutch landscape and responsible for keeping half the country above water.  Kinderdijk, a tiny village located on a strip of land between the Lek and Noord Rivers, is one of the most picturesque and iconic sights in all of Holland.  It has the largest concentration of operational windmills, some of them dating back to the 14th century, in the country.  The windmills were once employed with a system of dikes to pump water from the pastureland, forming an area of reclaimed land called the Alblasserwaard polder.  Although their function was taken over by a modern pumping station in 1950, the windmills are still in working order.