After a fantastic two days in Amsterdam, which has become my favorite European city, we boarded our river cruise vessel and headed upriver. We managed about 100 miles overnight and woke up in the Netherlands windmill Capitol of Kinderdijk. There were a number of ways to tour the area … we chose e-bikes.
The day started out cool and foggy, but was also very still, which allowed great reflections of the windmills on the water. There were 19 windmills, almost all built in the 18th century. In the 1950s the windmills had been put out of service and were falling apart. A faction of the town wanted to tear them down …others wanted to restore and maintain them. Luckily the restorers won. Families were allowed to move in and reside in the windmills, but they had to include a miller who ran the arms at least 60,000 rotations in a year. The service people were called “ millers “ because one of the primary jobs of the windmills was to grind grain.
These windmills, however, were used exclusively for water management. In the picture above, you can see the windmills set up in a line … the first turned the blades to move water in the direction of the next, which in turn moved it to the third, etc. The windmills have a mechanism that allows the blades to turn in the direction of the wind
This water management is now done only for the functional health of the windmills because the town now uses electric pumps to manage the water flows. But I didn’t see anyone clamoring to tour the electric pumps !!!
We got to personally tour the windmill above which was built a century earlier than the others. In this one, the miller had to climb the ladders and arms to manually set the direction and rotation rates.
All too soon, it was time to roll back to the starting point and bid goodbye … but not before an almost perfect picture day to see one of the world’s most well known features in its own environment.
The Adventures of Barry Brink 