Who said Holland was flat?

We started the day leaving Alkmaar, headed north to the uppermost northern area of the Netherlands. Here's a better photo of the cheese weighing house in Alkmaar than the one I posted yesterday, since the light was now coming from the right direction.
All during our bike rides, if our guides saw something they thought we'd be interested in, we'd stop and have a mini-lesson, even if it meant they had to knock on the door of a perfect stranger and ask then some questions. This was a mini-lesson on the wildflowers along the way. To the Dutch, everything has a use. They pick and dry the reeds that grow wild along the canals, bundle them and make thatch for thatch-roofed houses, trim branches off the willow trees, bundle them and use them to reinforce the sides of canals and to be a bottom layer when building dikes, and pick herbs and flowers from the fields to be added to their cheeses. One of our new favorite cheeses is stinging nettle cheese.

We stopped at a cheese farm to learn how cheese is made. This farmer is scooping out the cheese curds to place them in a mold and press them down to form a cheese wheel. We bought a couple of small cheese wheels. If you're in the area, you can come by our house and get a taste of plain Gouda-style cheese or stinging nettle cheese.

William and I just hanging around with one of the (inantimate) cows on the farm.

The farmer has 40 cows, which he milks twice daily. Since he makes cheese only twice a week he sells the rest of the milk to the dairy. While US dairies pay by the amount of milk, European dairies pay by the fat and protein content of the milk.

This next photo belongs at the end. Oops! Just read to the end and then come back to this one.

After biking through the dunes to the northernmost point of the Netherlands, we loaded the bikes on the barge and sailed to the island of Texel, where we will spend Sunday.

If you look closely you'll see that this is a ski slope. It's a hill shorter than the hill we live on, but they've made it a ski club with a rope tow and artificial turf something like plastic onto which they put some slippery liquid to make it slick. It's one of two ski areas in Holland. Very funny.

Because we're here so late in the year we didn't see many flowers in the field. This is a field of iris that we passed on the way to the ship.

This is what the Dutch call "the wasp." It's part of the nationwide system to protect the country from floods caused by storms in the North Sea. The land near the seacoast is protected by sand dunes, which were deposited over time from the sea, but the dunes in some places aren't high enough to keep storm floodwaters out, since the country is below sea level. This particular area has a 44' high reinforced concrete dike to prevent flooding, and this wasp thing runs from the dike out to sea, constantly measuring the force of the tides, the depth of the water and the force of the wind. It's sort of an early warning system for flooding.

Along the seawall for 10 km. is a flat, wide bike path, wide enough to accommodate something like 30 bikes alongside each other. I had ridden ahead of our troup and caught this picture of the rest of the "long" group coming to the end of this 10 km. stretch. There were fierce headwinds the entire day as we rode from south to north, so riding 10 km. (6.1 miles to you, Jan R) is a lot harder than it seems, especially since before and after this flat 10 km. there were hills up and down, all with headwinds.