Saturday, 8 April, Kinderdijk: déjà vu all over again

Written 15 June 2023

Lazy day aboard the ship today. The ship cast off at 4 am and cruised all morning, arriving in Kinderdijk at 1 pm. Yes, Kinderdijk again—our third visit in six months. So we sent Rachel off on the "Windmills and Dutch Cheese Making" excursion but stayed put ourselves.

But to start at the beginning. When I got up for breakfast, the view out my window was what you see at the left—solid fog. But by the time I got back from breakfast, the view had changed—a bright clear day with blue sky.

I took my computer up to the lounge to send the morning working on this diary, but at 10 am, the captain gave his "nautical talk," so I listened to that and took notes—I couldn't easily transcribe my recorded notes with him talking in the background on the PA.

We're on what Viking calls a "longship," the company's standard vessel for European river cruises. From its founding in 1997 up to 2012, they used ships purchased "off the rack" or bought from other cruise lines—in Russia, for example, we were on a ship built in East Germany and originally called the Marshal Koshovoy. Viking bought it and renamed it in 2014.

The captain told us that the longships are built in sections 4–6 windows long and then welded together. They are 143 ft long and 17.6 ft wide and carry 190 passengers. The crew number 57: 9 to run the ship and 48 to provide hospitality. As I mentioned somewhere above, our captain is licensed to take the ship up to 25 miles off the coast, but no more.

The first longship built, in 2012 at Neptun Werft in Rostock, Germany, was the Viking Odin. We actually moored alongside the Odin in Basel, Switzerland, in 2019 and had to walk through its lobby to get on and off our ship. Interestingly, it was doing an all-Chinese cruise—crew, staff, and passengers were all Chinese speakers.

Longships do not have rudders. All steering is done by the propellers and water jets, including two bow thrusters. The screws turn 360 degrees. Our ship has four main pairs of opposing propellers and lots of small ones. It's entirely electric; it runs on batteries but they have a generator, too. The engines are 900 hp; they include 12-cylinder caterpillar engines (did he say 32 of them?!), 900 KW, plus a smaller caterpillar and 1 even smaller for emergency use in blackouts. These engines are generators, 4 big and 2 little.

In the kitchens, a separator screens out the grease from the kitchen waste stream; it's picked up perodically for disposal (twice a month, I think he said).

The ship's draft is 1.7 to 3 m, depending on the amount of ballast they have aboard. (I suspect passengers count as ballast.)

The captain's talk was followed by the inevitable presentation on other Viking cruises you can take and option to buy shipboard vouchers. I ignored it as best I could and tried to continue work on the diary. I couldn't transcribe, but I could at least triage photos.

Then it was time for lunch. The fine-print appetizers (left) were a tiny one-shrimp open-face shrimp sandwich and a little dish of cold rigatoni dressed with the eggplant dish from the breakfast buffet, chopped finer. Both very good.

The "real" appetizer was the orange and carrot soup with pomegranate arils again. Very good but not as good as the version we had on the previous cruise.

For the main course, I think we all had the excellent farfalle carbonara. David specifically requested that I try it at home, and I have, quite successfully.

Dessert was orange panna cotta, also very good. David loves panna cotta, but orange is not his favorite flavor of it.

We moored at Kinderdijk about 1 pm, in time for the various excursion groups to disembark. Here they are, climbing the long gangway to the top of the dike, where they would cross the road that runs along its top, then follow a path down into the polder beyond it, with its group of 19 old-fashioned windmills. We couldn't quite see the windmills over the dike from the ship, but for his afternoon constitutional, David climbed up to the dike and walked along it for a little while before the cold wind drove him back aboard. I just kept typing.

In mid-afternoon, passengers from three of the four excursions came back aboard, and the ship cast off and headed for Rotterdam. The fourth excursion, the one Rachel was on, continued until 6 pm, and those passengers rejoined by us by bus at our Rotterdam mooring in time for dinner.

As we approached Rotterdam, I was able to get a better photo of the big Noah's ark replica, with its life-size giraffe in the bow.

Also on our approach to Rotterdam, I managed to get photos of a couple of interesting buildings. No one was narrating—we were just cruising along—so I had no idea what they were. But back home, I got on the internet, determined to find out. I love the internet.

The series of buildings in the left-hand photo look as though someone took a large, flat, cylindrical glass-and-steel building, cut it in quarters, and stood the quarters on edge, their rounded sides toward the river. My initial hypothesis was that they were appartment buildings. When I blew the photo up, I could read the word "Zalmhuis" on the smaller rectangular building among them, so I Googled "zalmhuis rotterdam"—it's Salmon House, a restaurant. There's only one in Rotterdam, so I Google-mapped it and zoomed in (using map, aerial photo, and street view) to confirm that it was indeed among the quarter cylinders. The latter may, in fact, include appartments, but the Google map showed many businesses as being in them—architects, legal firms, etc.—so I conclude that they are basicly office buildings.

Blowing up the right-hand photo revealed, below and in front of the spectacularly cantilevered structure, right on the river, two large cylindrical structures that said "Calvé" on them. Googling "calve rotterdam" instantly turned up a photo of the building and much information about it. Calé, a division of Unilever, is a brand of sauces—everything from BBQ to mayo to curry to, as it turns out, peanut butter. Better photos on the internet revealed additional lettering on the cylinders, which my photo is too dark to show. They are, in fact, giant Calvé brand peanut butter jars. (Peanut butter in Dutch is "pintakaas," which I think translates literally as "peanut cheese.") The cantilevered structure is the Rotterdam Calvé building.

Once Rachel and her companions had rejoined us, it was time for the Viking Explorers' cocktail party, followed by the evening briefing. about tomorrow's plans. Emelie: "So what do you think about this schedule; do you like it? Let me hear how much you like it, Yay!" I'm finding these briefings increasingly irritating; wordy, rambling, too much hype, not enough information. The ideal would be Alexandra, our tour director from the Douro in 2015—what we need to know, stated simply (but with a little humor), no constant cheerleading.

David started dinner with the red pepper tartlet with ratatouille, which he liked.

For the main course, I tried the regional-specialty seared trout filet with buttered potatoes and spinach (the latter mostly hidden under the fish.

David didn't want either that or the vegetarian Genovese minestrone, so he got the always-available ribeye again.

For dessert, I considered the regional specialty vanilla Napoleon, but I knew from experience that it would be soggy, so I joined everyone else in ordering the tarte Tatin, which was good (but again, not as good as the one on the previous cruise).

While we dined, the ship cast off and headed toward Antwerp.