Motorhomo!: Windmills, Big Wheels, and Big Red Rubbery Balls!

To say the Netherlands is flat is a bit of an understatement. The landscape is so pancake flat it’s almost unnerving, especially to two people from Yorkshire!

And wherever you go you’re surrounded by water as the whole country is latticed with canals and drainage ditches. It’s hard to see how the place isn’t constantly flooding but that’s why there are a lot of windmills here, which pump the water away from where it’s not wanted.

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From Amsterdam we headed into north into Noord-Holland. Now, here’s a little-known fact for you; Holland and the Netherlands are not the same. Holland is made up of just two of the 12 provinces which form the Netherlands – an area roughly between Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Den Helder.

After a quick stop at the very small and very quiet town of Edam, where we managed to resist the big red rubbery balls (quite an achievement for cheese lovers), we headed on to the coast at Hoorn.

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The huge stretch of water which separates Noord-Holland from the province of Friesland was once the Zuider Zee, or ‘Southern Sea’. But in 1932 a 30km long dyke called the Afsluitdijk was constructed at its mouth. The Zuider Zee became the Ijsselmeer, a huge fresh water lake; parts of it were drained and turned into farm land and the whole area was thus protected from flooding.

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Many of the country’s famous explorers once set sail from Hoorn to discover new lands such as New Zealand and Tasmania. In 1616 William Schouten set off to discover a route around South America and named its tip ‘Cape Hoorn’ in the process, after his home town.

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We spent a couple of days wandering around Hoorn and nearby Enkhuizen, where we camped at the harbour facing hundreds of Dutch barges. Both towns are very picturesque with attractive harbour areas and lots of very grand merchant’s houses.

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Having crossed the Afsluitdijk, we visited the world’s oldest working Planetarium at Franeker. It was built by Eise Eisinga, a local wool comber, on the ceiling of his living room in 1774. It took 7 years to complete but still accurately shows the movement of the planets, tide times, phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset times, position of the sun in the sky and much more.

The whole thing is run by the mechanism of one small clock and you can see all the connecting wheels, cogs and weights on the upper floor. It’s quite an incredible machine and well worth a visit.

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Our last stop before moving on to Germany was Groningen where we viewed the town from a big wheel, Alex having momentarily forgotten his fear of heights until it reached the top!

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The town’s most interesting sites were the Groningen museum buildings, and the huge number of bicycles which had recently been fished out of the town’s canals!