Kinderdijk

Our first attempt at purposefully visiting a UNESCO World Heritage sight ended in disappointment. South of Delft and outside of Rotterdam is the Kinderdijk Molen – 19 still working windmills that stand on a canal. Our plan was to park the van nearby, take the bikes and ride among the windmills taking photos to our hearts content. The reality was quite different. As large a tourist draw as this is, you’d think the area would have better parking for cars and campers. There was one parking area only and it’s camper van capacity was full. Ourselves and several other campers were turned away and left to our own devices. Now, if you know Bruce at all, you know he is pretty inventive and daring when it comes to stretching the rules. (He is NOT good at changing of itineraries, but that is a different subject.)
Since our first plan had been foiled, we (he – with my very reluctant agreement) began parking along the levies at precarious angles, hopping out for quick photo ops and back into the van searching for more photo ops.

The last opportunity was down a hillside behind a restaurant (this was my “reluctant agreement” – actually more like: “you’re not going down there, are you? Bruce!! You can’t go down there!!”) as he found a parking space. My beloved had the audacity to climb the back stairs of the restaurant in pursuit of the elusive “perfect” shot. By that time I was almost apoplectic and then, four more camper vans seeing us, swooped in and filled the lot. An employee came running out hollering “no, no, no!” as we left.
We have hopes of taking selfies with the UNESCO plaques to document our visits but this first try was a failure. At least we have the photos, although as you can see, they are nothing to brag about.
We are still battling the broken back door lock and decided to make the drive to Eindhoven 109km away, where a camping superstore – like the U.S. Camping World, but on steroids – was. We thought they might have a replacement lock we could install and finally make the van secure.

There is an interesting phenomenon about European driving we would like to share: according to conversion calculators 109km equals 68 miles. At home a drive of 68 miles on a State Hwy (ID-95, or CA-70) can be accomplished in 1hr15min at slightly less than 60mph.

I guess it’s no wonder the times are longer.

Back to our day.
We finally reached the camping store and were disappointed to learn they had no lock we could use. It was a huge store with a lot of tempting merchandise but just like Camping World, the prices were inflated. We did buy a book-type map of the Nederlands that we desperately needed. I told Bruce I was buying a map, I didn’t care if it cost 100 euros; fortunately it did not.

By now it was nearly 5pm and we had no idea what our next plan was or even where we were spending the night. We checked the ACSI camping book and found a site, Camping de Bocht, about 11km away. We arrived there at 5:50 (11 kilometers for crying out loud) It was lovely and had the amenities we had been enjoying. It began raining just as we got settled so we opened our awning set out our chairs and table and had pre-dinner hors d’ouvres that turned into dinner.
We contacted Donna with our disappointing news and made plans to return to Utrecht on Monday. In the meantime we decided to spend the weekend in Amsterdam