Second River Cruise

 This is our second river cruise, but this time we’re traveling with Judy‘s two sisters; Barbara, and Jake and Janet and Jeff. We are traveling from Amsterdam to Budapest on the grand European tour with Viking. Judy and I left Sacramento on Monday and arrived Tuesday at noon. We slept for four hours in our hotel room and went to the Ann Frank house. It is hard to imagine the horror of those years during the second world war when the Nazis had taken over Netherlands and were hunting down Jewish families and many other people to send them to work camps and concentration camps. Many people in the Netherlands resisted the Nazis and some hid the Jews and other people scheduled to go to work camps. Ann Frank’s journals give a vivid picture of those terrible times. What would you have done?

 

The canals of Amsterdam are very picturesque. 

This was the Frank’s warehouse with several rooms hidden upstairs behind a bookcase.

On Wednesday, we went to Haarlem to visit the Corrie Ten Boom house where their family hid Jews and young men and students who were resisting being sent to work camps in Germany. Haarlem is an old city with a very large church and canals and a working windmill that was recently reconstructed. We had a great day seeing the town of Haarlem with beautiful weather. We first visited the Tyler museum, who was a man who wanted to give an opportunity for people to study science and art. He left his fortune with 5 friends to build a Museum and Laboratory and art studio after he died in 1890, since he had no children.

The Tyler museum physics laboratory had lots of early electricity apparatus for experiments 

The Tyler art gallery allowed young artists to study the old masters and their drawings.

Here is an old decorative building.

Here is a really big organ with 5,000 pipes. You can borrow the CD that I bought of baroque music played on this church organ.

We went inside this recently constructed wooden windmill that can be turned to face the wind. 

The Modern craftsmen use wooden ship building techniques. The Dutch people built very sturdy ships. The windmill is on top of the brick house to raise it to better catch the wind.

Our canal boat ride in Haarlem was relaxing.

The captain directed us to an Indonesian restaurant, because Indonesia was a Dutch colony. We rode the train back to Amsterdam, and a tram back to our hotel. This was a great first day of our second river cruise adventure.