Kinderdijk

Port 1 of the Grand European Tour on the Viking Skirnir, November 2024.

*******

After boarding the ship in Amsterdam, our first stop was in Kinderdijk in the Netherlands' South Holland province. We learned how the Dutch have been managing the waters that would otherwise flood their low-lying land, and the engineering expertise that they have developed over the centuries. 

The more I learned about clever Dutch engineering, planning, and management, the more my admiration and understanding grew for the Dutch family (VandenBoom) I married into, and for my own Dutch ancestors, the Gibersons/Guibersons. 

Looking up the canal, showing some of the 19 windmills built around 1740.

The job of miller was handed down from father to son (and now to daughters, as well), sometimes over as many as 16 generations. One of the fathers built a small-scale windmill (unfortunately not shown here) for his little son, so that the boy could mimic his father's tasks on the larger mill and thus safely learn his future job.

This photo was meant to show just how tall the windmill stretches up. Inside there were steep stairways (more like ladders) from the kitchen/living room floor, to the one where the parents of the family slept, to the floors with small rooms for the sons and for the daughters of the family. At one time, a family of 14 lived here. 

November 18, 1741: A huge storm caused the catastrophic St. Elizabeth's Flood, which drowned both people and villages. A folk tale grew up over time, telling the story of searchers finding a child floating in a cradle that was kept in balance by a cat that jumping back and forth on the basket to keep it from sinking. This brass monument to the tale is called Beatrice's Cradle, unveiled 600 years after the flood.