Every town has drawbridges over the canals, some 12000 of them in the entire country. Some, like this one, are manually operated.
Looks like we're in Venice. There was an authentic-looking Venetian gondola parked outside this building, complete with striped pole at the pier.
Alkmaar is a really pretty old town.
Since houses were taxed by their width at street level, sometimes they were built with each floor wider than the lower one.
Evening shot of the cheese market building and museum.
Almshouse (housing for the poor) in Alkmaar. These houses are present in every town and consist of small apartments (24 here) surrounding a garden area. In times past the garden would have had a well and been herbs and other useful plants. Nowadays they are usually only decorative, but they are still used to house the poor and widowers/widows.
Ice cream stop for the "long ride" group on the way to Alkmaar. The woman to my left is Jannika, one of our guides.
Wm. at the statue of Hans Brinker, holding his finger in the dike. This is, of course, fictional, as dikes are not walls but thick rock and earthen berms between fields of different elevations. It wouldn't do much good to stick one's finger in a dike to prevent leaks.
The "new" St Bavo's catholic church in Haarlem. (see explanation below).As we left Haarlem we cycled by the "new" St. Bavo's church, built in the late 1880's. The original St. Bavo's is the church with the 5000-pipe organ we saw the first day in the Netherlands. After the Reformation, all dcatholic churches had the murals, statues of saints, etc. removed (graven images) and were renamed, usually "great church" or something similar, as naming a church for a saint was associated with catholicism. So Haarlem built a new St. Bavo's church, which is pictured in today's uploads. It combines several architectural styles and is quite beautiful.
After Haarlem we cycled through some hilly areas with large mansions built by the merchant class which became rich during Holland's heyday. Huge, beautiful homes with extraordinary gardens. Then we crossed by ferry over a very large canal built to link the port of Amsterdam directly west to the North Sea. We cycled through a lot of farmland, some dunes near the coast and finally came to our night stop in Alkmaar. On the way we passed the statue of the fictional character, Hans Brinker (see above).
Alkmaar is a lovely town. Small enough to walk through easily but big enough to have a variety of areas to see. It's the site of the cheese market that you may have seen on Dutch tourist photos. Every Friday a.m. the farmers in the surrounding area bring their cheeses to the town square, where they are sampled by and sold to cheese brokers. Everyone's in costume and it's quite festive. We got here too late in the day to see it. You can see the photo above of the cheese weighing house and museum, which is quite beautiful. (Poor photo -- sorry but the sun was setting behind it so the detail is lost in the photo. Will lighten it up on my computer at home, but for now you just see the silhouette.) Today we are off to the far north of the Netherlands to stay overnight on an island.
Alkmaar is the home of the remaining active cheese guild. It's the place where you may have seen photos of cheeses stacked all over the marketplace and being carried on large wooden sled-type devices by men in costume. Every Friday morning they have a cheese market, where the cheeses from the local area are sampled by buyers and sold on the market square. We got here too late in the day to see it
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