Soup

Today, Polly and Mia and I stay on the boat. The girls are exhausted, Polly is more resolute than unaffected by her accident, and I am loathe to leave them. The others set out and we sail forth, toward the new town of Zeewolde through a light soup of mist, past bevies of swans and columns of turbines, the diesel steady with a low one-two beat.

Zeewolde was built in the 70s and 80s and is too well organized to be truly interesting. Two shopping streets establish an organizing cruciform, residential streets march into the countryside, it is all polder exposed by pumping the Ijsselmeer. As I understand it, that pumping is continuous, sea level and rainwater pressing constantly to inundate the low lying land. It explains all these beautiful wind turbines.

Note to Ted Kennedy: come to the Netherlands, embrace the beauty, Nantucket Sound will be just fine. Wind energy is worth it.

Here's a pump station from earlier in the trip...in this case, no nearby turbine. The lack of a chimney suggests that the pumps run on electricity though.

Zeewolde does have one noteworthy bit of architecture: an abandoned library. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but there’s a model of it at Madurodam, and that appears to be one of the impediments to its demolition. Madurodam is the entire country of the Netherlands modeled in miniature on a few acres in Den Haag, a place I remember my grandfather taking my sister and I as kids…though I probably remember it more for the extravagant ice cream sundae he bought us (colorful umbrella AND monkey on a straw)than for the miniatures…This is the same grandfather that once parked his car on a hill, put on the parking brake, told his grandson under NO CIRCUMSTANCES to touch the brake, then had to run and dive to save his car when curiosity took the better of me: my first driving lesson.

We buy some books in English at the bookstore, the girls shop, I write a little: a lazy day. Just what we needed. For lunch, Anina makes us a wonderful cup of soup.

Zeewolde, Netherlands