Stranded!

 Well, nothing has gone quite according to plan on our adventure. As I've said earlier on, the extreme heatwave here has affected our travels seriously. On any trip on the canals here, you are limited by the height of your boat and the height of the multiple bridges you need to pass under or through. Small day boats can pass under many of them. We are neither the smallest nor anywhere near the largest on the waters. At every bridge below the very largest, on the highways, the height is listed on the waterways app, Waterkaarten. Unless there is a person at the bridge full time, one needs to telephone on arrival to request the bridge to open. It's fun, up to a certain point. ( of course I can easily say that as I am not the one piloting the boat. Some bridges will then automatically open. At others you need to wait for the bridge person to come. More than once we've had the same person arrive on bicycle, then move up to open the next bridge.  There are light signals to indicate one can go under if you can clear the bridge, red and green to indicate the bridge is about to open, then green when it's okay to go through. This is complicated by the fact that when you call you get a recording naming a number of bridges and which number to push for each bridge. All in Dutch, of course. But we are getting better at understanding the numbers and the names of the bridges. 

All of this is just prelude to what has left us seriously stranded for days. The bridge that would have let us pass beyond Monfoort and continue on our journey has been inoperable for days due to the extreme heat. So have many other bridges been. So we basically tooled back and forth between Monfoort and  the marina at IJsselstein where there is electricity, showers, water to refillll our tank, and a pumpout for the waste tank, all important. We are not really using electricity for much, except the refrigerator, but it wouldn't be fun to not have cold drinks, especially during the heat wave. And we do have other food requiring refrigeration, like yogurt, cheese, butter. 

So our plan changed out of necessity. The distances by road here are actually much shorter, though not as scenic or pleasant. So we took busses from Montfoord to different towns on two days, to Ouldewater one day, and to Gouda on another. Gouda, the famous cheese town, had been on our itinerary. We would probably just have passed through Oudewater on our original plan. It is actually a quite pleasant town, lots of typical architecture, small canals, and a history of witches that the town capitalizes on, of course. The people immediately reacted when we mentioned we were from the city next to Salem, MA. The man noticed Loring's t shirt from the Salem film festival, which Loring hadn't even realized he was wearing.  The small museum was originally a weighing house, and the original large scale was still there. 

It turns out that Oudewater was known for its tolerance, and that women accused of witchcraft went there to prove their innocence by being weighed. Witches were supposed to be very light in weight, which enabled them to fly. If you were heavy enough you weren't a witch and would be issued a certificate to say so. Now, visitors can get on the scale to be weighed and are then issued a certificate to say they weren't a witch. So we both now are certified as free of witchiness. It was all done with equal measures of seriousness and tongue-in-cheekness. 

I tried to explain there are people in Salem and elsewhere today that consider themselves witches, or Wiccans, but that they use their powers for good. I don't think they really believed me. And in the back of my mind I kept hearing Glinda's question of "are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Gouda, our next destination by bus, was a little beyond Oudewater, but only about a half hour from Montfoord. It's a tourist town, for sure, with lots of cheese shops and also siropwafels,  the other food for which the town is famous. They are waffle cookies with a caramel like layer sandwiched between two cookies. At about 10am the town was remarkably quiet, but within an hour or two many more people were on the streets, both visitors and locals. Thursdays are the days when the cheese market takes place, and I am sure it's much more crowded then. From what I've seen and read it's somewhat of a ritualistic and touristic event, but also a real market that has been taking place for centuries. There's some kind of slapping that goes along with people purchasing the huge cheese wheels, which I haven't quite figured out. I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad that we missed the market day. 

Gouda has a church that is the longest church in the country, 123  meters and lined with impressive stained glass windows  ranging from the 16th century up to nearly the present. One from 1945 depicted concentration camp survivors in one panel of a window depicting victory. Another one showed the defeat of tyranny in a much older century. During WWII the panels of the old windows were dissassembled, stored in wooden crates in various places, and reinstalled after the war. The church had originally been Catholic, but then became Protestant, and still is. I don't know how common that is, I hadn't heard about anything like that before. But then there's a lot about religion that I don't understand. I'll have to check with AI. 

We had bought a combined ticket for the church and the town museum, as the person at the church had suggested. But when we got to the museum, we discovered that it's closed on Mondays. Luckily the church was just around the corner, so we went back. The woman was apologetic and they promptly refunded our money. I think she was new and/or didn't realize the museum was closed that day. Too bad, as I realized later that the museum has a wonderful tile collection. The town of Delft, which I'd hoped to  go to, is famous for its blue and white tile and ceramics. But in fact it was also produced in Gouda, and, I think, a few other nearby towns.

Just as we were strolling through town and Loring mentioned that he didn't mind sitting and reading when we didn't have a particular agenda, I spotted a second hand clothing store. I mean literally at the same moment. So, he spent probably a half hour sitting and reading while I found several appealing and very reasonable pieces of clothing. One from the three euro bin, which I am wearing right now.