Seven members of the Peoples Bank Platinum Club—Steven and Deborah Ammann, Brenda and Danny Cowart and Oliver and Donna McLean of Simpson County— left home on April 17 and joined four other traveling friends from Georgia and Tennessee in Atlanta for a flight to Amsterdam.
There, they were joined by friends from Seattle, Wash., to form a congenial group of 13 for an eight-day river cruise with 90 other travelers through the Netherlands and Belgium.
The Netherlands is the official name of the small country that is often called “Holland,” though that name only refers to the two provinces of North Holland and South Holland. “Nether” means low, and the country bordered by the North Sea certainly fits that description, having to fight to keep its low land dry enough to inhabit. Belgium to the south is almost as low, but doesn’t have to work quite as hard to wrest arable land from the seeping water.
The group flew in a day early to spend an extra day in Amsterdam, the 800-year-old capitol of the Netherlands. They wandered the city’s busy streets, visiting such sites as the Rembrandt Museum, the flea and antique market and the Flower Market, and some even ventured into Amsterdam’s fabled Red Light District — only as sightseers, of course!
They quickly learned to jump out of the way of the thousands of cyclists who travel the city on their bikes at the speed of cars and have the right of way. Amsterdam is said to have a population of 920,000 residents and 1.2 million bikes.
Later that afternoon they boarded the river cruiser Amadeus Brilliant, for the next seven days of cruising the waterways of the Netherlands and Belgium.
Before leaving Amsterdam, though, the 103 passengers on the Brilliant had an official tour of the city with a morning canal boat cruise on Amsterdam’s canals, getting an upclose look at the archtitecture of the old Dutch houses and the more modern houseboats that line the canals and are so popular as residences.
That afternoon, passengers chose whether to visit a Dutch cheese farm (Dutch cheese is said to be the best in the world) or visit the medieval city of Haarlem, the home of Corrie ten Boom, subject of the book The Hiding Place, and the location of the Cathedral of St. Bavos.
On April 21, it was on to the city of Arnhem, where the tour group split up to either wander the city’s shopping district, visit the Arnhem Airborne Museum or the stroll through the Kroller-Muller Museum, which claims to have the world’s finest colection of Vincent van Gogh paintings.
After a night’s cruise, the travelers arrived in the charming city of Middelburg on April 22, then on April 23 visited what many believe to be the most beautiful city in Europe, Bruges, Belgium. Sometimes called “the Venice of the North” for its wide, winding canals, Bruges is a photographer’s delight with its soaring cathedral, its charming medieval architecture and curving bridges and its spacious town square.
In Bruges, the Platinum club travelers loaded up on the fabled Belgian chocolate and risked waistline expansion sampling hot Belgian waffles bought from street vendors.
The next day featured a tour of the city of Antwerp and the Captain’s Gala dinner, one of many delicious gourmet meals offered three times a day on board during the cruise.
The last day of touring brought the most undeniably Dutch experiences. The first was the village of Kinderdijk, where the country’s iconic windmills are found in greatest concentration.
After a canal tour of the area and an explanation by the local guide of the mills’ vital work in transferring water away from the land, the group was invited into a mill’s living quarters that once housed a miller’s family. Modern mills are electrically powered and more efficient, of course, but they cannot touch the old windmills for beauty and a reminder of the old machines that saved Holland from the North Sea.
The afternoon was spent at the beautiful Keukenhof Gardens near Amsterdam, where fields of red, pink, white, purple and yellow tulips stretch toward the horizon. The gardens themselves present a more formal arrangements of tulips of various colors and strains mixed with other plants. The words “beautiful, gorgeous, unbelieveable” were the predominant descriptions of what the travelers were seeing. Some purchased tulip bulbs to be sent to them next fall, though tulips do not do well in this part of the South, but most simply enjoyed being in one of the world’s loveliest spots on a cold but sunny spring afternoon.
The cruise ended on April 26, and the travelers made the 8 1/2 hour flight back to Atlanta, where they said goodbye and “see you on the next trip” to the seven friends who were not returning to Simpson County.
The Holland and Belgium Springtime River Cruise was coordinated by Deborah Ammann of On the Go Travel and hosted by Collette.
