Windmill here.
Windmill there.
Windmill, windmills everywhere! :-)
Kinderdijk is a remarkable place to tour windmills.
25% of the Netherlands today consists of land below sea level. The windmills we saw date back to the early 1500's when the Dutch used them to make the underwater land usable for farming.
There are 19 windmills in Kinderdijk but back in the day this area had 150 windmills to get the job done. The extremely advanced (for their time) windmills pumped the water from the fields and into the dikes. The dikes that are everywhere would have required a LOT of hard labor to form too. Wow!
Today the water is still pumped off the land but it is now done by other types of power pumps. It was around the 1950's that modernization caught up with Kinderdijk but to this day these 19 windmills are still operational (just in case they need to be used).
All except 2 of the 19 windmills are privately owned & lived in as either a main residence or as a vacation home. How would you like to live in a windmill?!
We enjoyed this self guided bike tour...even if it was really cold. Brrrrr.
Pretty day!
Kinderdijk. Check. :-)
That is really interesting about the windmills..would have been interesting to stay in one...you and Bob look like you are cold...BRRR!
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