Today is an easy day and Mom likes that. It's a long run from Cologne to Kinderdijk and the boat has been on the river since late last night. We still have a ways to go today to reach our destination by 2:00pm. It's a walking tour of one of the last groups of windmills still operating in Holland.

Kinderdijk is a small village 10 miles from Rotterdam and a little bit less than 6 miles from the city border of the oldest city in Holland, Dordrecht. Nevertheless, it is a village unique for its windmills. A network of 19 windmills was built around 1740 to drain the polder of Kinderdijk and surrounding polders. Polders are areas of land below sea level that are protected by dikes. The windmills stand in neat rows along an L-shaped drainage canal, where they pumped water from the surrounding polders until steam and electric pumps offered more reliable protection against flooding. One windmill is still operating and that's the one we'll get to go inside of.

Another uneventful breakfast and Mom resumes her packing.Our two bags plus backpacks have expanded to four bags plus our backpacks. They're all running from 25 to 42 pounds so we're good with that. Her souvenirs are in the hard cases buried in clothes and the two duffel bags are clothes only. It worked last trip.

We dock at Kinderdijk and our guide takes us to the windmills, all the while walking and talking about the life of the millers who work there 24 hours a day. There's a new electric system in use now with the steam engines from the early 1900's silent now. The windmills all function and are used as backup should power fail. It could flood in a matter of a few days if the pumps stopped altogether. He tells us 30% of Holland is below sea level at low water levels and 60% at higher levels. Muskrats are a big problem and they remove 25,000 every year. Their biggest concern now other than a weather catastrophe is terrorism attack of their dike system. He's very interesting and we tip him as he guides us to the ever present souvenir shop.

We stop at the other Viking ship Bragi and secure a shirt and Mom's tote bag finally. We still have a shipboard credit so we blow the last of it on a 50% off future cruise deposit. Time to get ready for the big bash tonight. The intro of all the staff and some fancy meal with champagne. I had my usual Tequila Sunrise and Mom blew off the usual White Russian and had Amaretto on the rocks. We sat with a radiologist from Colorado and Mom talked about Nickole with him. All in all it was a nice evening and since we were packed up already, we stayed until 11pm and that was it.

Tomorrow we made arrangements with the desk to have a cab ready for us at 11am to take us to our hotel, just a few blocks away but impossible to navigate to by ourselves with our luggage.