Dutch Windmills

Earliest departure yet. 8:15am. Still dark and light rain.

My observations relating to drivers is that as a sweeping generalisation, they are not as polite as Aussie drivers. They don't let others in. They just push in. Cyclists including children ride on the road in the dark with no lights. The occasional bike has lights. Most don't.

Train to Amsterdam.

Dropped into the "I Amsterdam" tourist info place to investigate a tourist card. Decided in the end it was uneconomic.

Visited the train office and added €40 to each transport cards.

Train to Zaanse Schans.

By the time we arrived, the Sun had come out.

spent the day assisting foreign tourists to look at windmills.

Someone had the idea a few years back to restore the windmills and they've done a great job of creating a tourist draw card.



At one stage a sleet squall disrupted the sun shine. Jemma observed it was raining dippin dots.

This quaintly contrasts the old and the new and even the new is out of date given the swing to solar and electric wind turbines.

Fascinating to look at the mechanism. Wooden gear wheels. Apparently the golden Age was the 1700's. Did not last long as they were displaced by steam engines.

These are big and quite freaky.  As an interesting aside, we later went to the weavers house where in the hey day of weaving they made canvas sail cloth.  Really rough by todays standards but this was used on sailing ships and windmills

The grinding wheels are dam heavy.

Note the scraper mechanism that pulls the powder back under the wheel

These cutters I think are the first step to break up the large rocks into smaller ones.  There is an indexing gear at the bottom to rotate the pot.  The four stompers are lifted by pins in the horizontal axle (next level up)