Up this morning to breakfast with the gang. I only had Special K and a banana. I need to eat less. There are not a lot of choices on this line. They serve you a soup and main course for lunch and dessert. Dinner is appetizer, main course and dessert. And they really like it for you to eat dessert.
Our excursion today was up to a bulb farm. The drive took about one hour. We got to one spot and found out we were too big to cross the bridges. The weather was quite windy and cold. We were up by the north sea. The tulips were not up but the daffodils and hyacines were. The bulb farmers do not care about the flowers, only the bulbs. So they cut the flowers off and wait for the leaves to dry up and then they harvest the bulbs. All very interesting. The flowers we buy in our shops come from hot houses.
The pictures some how got out of order but I think you will be able to follow along. As we drove to the bulb farm we passed lots of other farms and as you can see, the tulips go on for miles it seems.
The farmers cover some of the fields with plastic to keep the crop warmer. This is think is white asparagus. And they rotate fields. They do not use the same fields every year.
We stopped to take pictures of the red tulips as our bulb farmer did not have any tulips up yet. Here you can see red, white and some yellow coming. As I said before, these farmers are only interested in the bulbs and not the flowers.
Here is a field of hyacins (spelling wrong) white and Gretchen's favorite, purple.
Just a close up of the purple flowers. We were able to pick them. They smell wonderful. Not our cabin has a flower vase filled with daffodils and hyacin.
The farm we visited was John and Mary. His tulips were not quite ready for prime time.
Of course, there are canals all over the countryside.
John teaching us about the different daffodils. When we lived in Delaware, our home had been planted with several different kinds of daffodils. I do miss them as we do not have bulbs in Florida. I am not sure why except it does not get as cold as the bulbs like. We do have sandy soil that they favor. The man in the blue coat at the right of the picture next to the flowers is Jim Geiger. He and his wife live in Tallahassee and Gainsville, Florida. We are going to do research and see if we are related.
Just a view of the harbor where we were docked.
This is one of the locks that you need to travel through. The Netherlands have lots of the modern windmills for power.
More fields of red tulips
This is a typical Holland farm house. The front part is the home of the family and the large rear part is for the cattle.
We had to take the pictures from the bus so there is some glare.
More fields of flowers.
This is at the farm of John and Mary. Lots and lots of daffodils. I picked six different kinds for our cabin.
To say it was windy was an understatement. His farm is right next to the North Sea. So it was cold and very windy. I ended up eating sand and trying my best to keep it out of my eyes. Judy loaned me the head band.
After our bulb trip, we headed back to the ship. Lunch on the boat where the Captain told us he was going to leave early as it was so windy, it would slow our progress.
During the trip to Hoorn, the waves came over the front of the boat. And a little rocky at times. This was surprising as we were in a lake. Just tells you how windy it was.
These are the waves in the lake on our way to Hoorn.
We arrived in Hoorn and walked to an old church to have dinner with some local people. I will tell more about the dinner later and add pictures, but it was a wonderful evening.
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