May 2

You may or may not be able to see the picture I downloaded.  Our internet access is through a satelite.  It seems to have problems with dowloading and uploading pictures.

Hello faithful followers,

It is just past 11:00 PM on the boat.  We had a relaxing day getting used to life on the cruise.

We have been meeting people from all over the United States on our vacation.  We ate with different sets of people at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

This morning we visited a place called Kinderdijk.  We left the port of Amsterdam on Sunday night at 11:30 PM.  We sailed through the night.  There is little or no motion on the boat.  It is very stable.

We woke up this morning docked in Kinderdijk.  We have TV in our room.  We knew as soon as we woke up about Osama bin Laden which would have been a couple of hours after President Obama made his announcement.  We watched the CNN reports as people gathered in Times Square, Ground Zero and at the White House.  Coverage here has been continous all day everytime we turned on the TV.

After eating breakfast with two ladies traveling together (Catherine & Elizabeth) from Baltimore and Texas, we put on our warm clothing as it was in the low 50s with a stiff wind.  They divided the ship up into 4 groups of people that wanted to see the windmills.

We walked off the ship and had a walking tour of this Unesco World Heritage site.  They have 19 windmills from the 17th and 18th centuries.  We were able to go inside one of the working windmills.  They are very powerful.  Their main purpose was to pump water out of areas below sea level and into the canals.  The secondary purpose was as a source of power to grind grain.  The windmills became obsolete with the introduction of steam powered pumps.  Now all of their pumping stations are electric powered.

We left Kinderdijk at 11:30 AM and have been sailing ever since.  Just after we left Kinderdijk we had the mandatory life jacket drill with reporting to our muster stations.  That was followed almost immediately by lunch.

The weather warmed up as the day went on and the wind died down as we got further from the North Sea.  We didn't spend a lot of time on the top deck because of the wind.  We took naps this afternoon and then joined in the social aspect of cruising later in the afternoon and into the evening until it was time for dinner.

They have various nonstop things that pass the time away.  At 4:00 PM they had a Dutch Tea which gave us another opportunity to eat pasteries.  That was followed by a question and answer session with the ship's captain.  We learned things like the river is 12 feet deep in the channel, the boat has a 6 foot draft, we are traveling at 8 miles per hour and so on.

At 6:30 PM they formally introduced the ship's officers and staff.  The ship's captain looks like that tall skinny guy with the close haircut from the Drew Carey Show.  After the introductions we received a talk on our port of call for tomorrow (Cologne, Germany).  Then it was time for dinner!

We crossed the Netherlands/German border as we were eating dinner this evening around 7:45 PM.

We ate dinner with a couple from Ohio and a couple from Massechusetts.  There were 6 of us at our table tonight.  We were busy talking and were among the last to leave the dining room.

WE hope everyone back home is in good health and having a good week.

Greg & Mary