Day 33 - Kinderdijk & Rotterdam

The plan today was to drive to Belgium to see Antwerp. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go because they have a new emissions scheme where you must register your car in advance before entering the city and you must need a pass.

We decided to explore more parts of the Netherlands instead.

We started off with a drive to Kinderdijk which is a place where there are heaps of windmills all in one spot.

When we arrived, there was no parking anywhere nearby - only in a restaurant park. This seemed like a great excuse to get some lunch there.

The restaurant was amazing!! The menu was huge and you could order nearly any Dutch food you could think of! They had really cute place mats too!

The girls ordered poffertjes and Auke and I ordered croquettes.

Once we had finished, we did some quick souvenir shopping, and then started walking to all the windmills.

It was absolutely beautiful seeing so many windmills in one place! We weren’t disappointed at all - in fact this place even exceeded our expectations!

We wished we could spend longer looking and walk further into the windmills, but we had to go as we had to drive to Rotterdam to make the boat tour we had booked.

We walked back to the car, where the kids ran down the dike to the car park. They love how steep all the dikes are in the Netherlands!

We quickly drove there which took about 25 minutes. On the way there, we saw a street sign for Kralingen which was so cool to see!

Once we had parked at the parking garage, we nearly had to run to make it to the hot by 2.15. After 20 minutes of walking, we made it just in time!

The boat tour we booked was an all you can eat pancakes boat. We immediately regretted having lunch!

The boat had three types of pancakes you could choose - natural, apple or bacon. Once you chose your pancake you had about fifty toppings you could add to it!

The girls had great fun making their creations.

Lana’s looked like this:

And Mila’s was this:

Ali could only eat one, and the girls about half each, but Auke made up for it by eating five!

While we were on the boat eating our pancakes, we were sailing across the Rotterdam waters seeing sights such as Erasmus Bridge, the SS Rotterdam (which we missed a photo of), and De Hef.

The boat also had a ball bit for the kids to play in when they had finished their pancakes. It even had a slide!

Once the boat ride was done, we started to walk back to the car. On the way back, we stopped to watch people base jumping off the Euromast which was very entertaining! Some of them came so close they nearly hit us!

We came across some interesting statues also on the way to the car!

We drove home back to Garderen and had some Dutch snacks for dinner!