Catching up a bit!..... Kinderdijk at half term

(Been a bit lax on the old blipfoto recently - life, the universe and everything getting in the way so a few 'catching up' photos to publish - this, after all, is my diary of my time in the Netherlands and just happens to be linked with Facebook so that I can keep in touch! Apologies for the tardiness of this news.....)

Anyways...half term, a couple of weeks ago..... we decided to take a few 'local' trips, rather than venture across Europe for the holiday.

Wednesday - we revelled in the marvel that is Dutch water management (I know nothing about civil engineering but still find this stuff fascinating), by taking a trip to Kinderdijk and then to view the delta works (explanations to follow).

Kinderdijk is.... windmills galore (19 in close proximity to be precise), canals and waterways - iconic images of the Netherlands. To quote from their website: The Kinderdijk windmills are considered a Dutch icon throughout the entire world......For many years, these windmills kept the low-lying, peat land of the Alblasserwaard dry. This land was continually threatened by floods and soil compaction. In Kinderdijk, the almost one thousand years of 'battling the water' is still visible in the polder landscape. It’s with good reason, that the Kinderdijk-Elshout windmill complex was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997.

Without seeing it, and without being here, I think it's difficult to appreciate the incredible job the Dutch do to keep the water from the land, the sea at bay. Kinderdijk encapsulates the huge effort they make to manage the delicate balance between water and land, that enables the population on the west side of the country, not to live under the sea! Later that day, we also drove to view the Dutch delta works (a series of vast dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees and storm surge barriers, built after the huge flood of 1953 that killed 1,836, designed to protect the south west of the country from flooding.) Note, the delta works have been declared one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Not surprising when you see them close at hand.