Windmills at Zaanse Schans

I left Belgium in the evening and returned to Holland late that night.  My friend Karen came the next morning and stayed in Haarlem for a few days.  Unfortunately there was a major power outage on the trains between Haarlem and Amsterdam during the whole time Karen was in the Netherlands, and I proved to not be so great at navigating the bus system!  Still, we had a wonderful time visiting some of the sites in Holland, eating warm stroopwafels and fried fish at the market, and going to a fabulous place I had never visited--Zaanse Schans.

Zaanse Schans is a reconstructed Dutch village with painted wooden houses, boat docks, bridges, and several windmills.

There used to be hundreds of windmills in this area, grinding flour, crushing minerals, and even cutting timber.  The Dutch made good use of the powerful winds sweeping over the stretches of flat land in their country.  Today there are only about half a dozen in Zaanse Schans, and although they still work, they are mostly for tourists.

People live in some of the picturesque houses in this little village, but most are for tourists.

We went inside a reconstruction of an Albert Hijn grocery store.  There are Albert Hijn stores in most Dutch train stations and all through the cities.  It was pretty interesting to see what it would have looked like over a century ago.

We went inside a windmill that was used to grind chalk and pigments for painters.  The power from the wind is transferred to the grinding stones through an extremely complicated system of cogs and wheels.

Here you can see the stones grinding chalk.  They don't roll at a continuous rate like an engine-powered grinder.  Instead they suddenly speed up or slow down, according to the wind.

We climbed a precipitously steep ladder to get to a balcony in the windmill.  I'm surprised they even let visitors go up there.  There was an American woman trying to climb down backwards and making essentially no progress.  She just started laughing and said, "You know, this is nearly impossible to do with bifocals--I can't see any of the steps!"

The view from the balcony was really stunning with the windmills spinning, the sun shining on the water, and a large green field divided by small canals stretching into the distance.