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 September 13, 2021 Flying home today.  All packed up the night before and leaving the Skirnir at 7:30 am.  The ride to the Amsterdam airport gave us a quick glimps of the modern architecture...They are very creative and it was a fascintaing drive.  I wasn't able to get good pictures, but I wanted to share a few that we saw along the way.  I think you will agree that their buildings are truly unique.  There were so many top heavy designs and structures on stilts....I just wanted to give you an idea of the uniqueness of their buildings. Eye Film Museum on the Rhine Apartment Building Dubbed “ARCAM” for short, the Architecture Centre of Amsterdam Amazing top heavy designs Inspiration.....container ships??? 
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 September 12, 2021 Amsterdam with a stop in Kinderdijk  This is the final leg of our cruising journey - Budapest to Amsterdam.  As we head to Amsterdam, the boat will drop us off at Kinderdijk, a small village in the province of Holland in the Netherlands (Nederlands = low lands in German).  I t is located about 9 miles east of  Rotterdam . Kinderdijk is situated in the  Alblasserwaard  polder at the  confluence  of the  Lek  and  Noord  rivers. To drain the polder, a system of 19  windmills  was built around 1740. This group of mills is the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands. The  windmills of Kinderdijk  are one of the best-known  Dutch tourist sites . Our windmill tour guide kept using the word polder and I had not heard this word before.  She kept referring to the area that gets waterlogged and needs to be drained as polder so I kept substituting  in my head he...
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 September 11, 2021  The Skirnir flew it's flags at half mast for the 20th anniversary of 9-11.  It was a sweet gesture and a grim reminder...in the background news, the US has just finished pulling it's military from Afghanistan - a 20 year endeavor to root out terrorist and extremists.  It is a bittersweet time.  We watched this news carefully as Nate was deployed on the USS Eisenhower in that arena. His deployment was extended to be available to assist with this process, but luckily they were allowed home after another group arrived to take over.  But I digress...back to the river. Cologne, Germany Docking in Cologne one could tell right away that it was a very large city dominated by it's most historic landmark, the very very Gothic Cologne Cathedral.   We also could see the Great St  Martin, one of the 12 restored Romanesque  churches. We now seemed far from the quaint and medieval little towns that we had been visiting . ...
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