Wednesday

Wednesday we went to Rotterdam Harbour. This is the largest port in the world and it is MASSIVE! We went on a two and one half hour tower of the harbor on a beautiful boat. The first thing that I noticed was the bridge that was very nearly the same as our Winnipeg bridge (Winnipeg copied it of course!). As we started to sight see, one side of the harbor looked new with high rises like our side of the Atlantic and the other side still had the charming old houses like the rest of Holland. Being the needed harbor during the war, Rotterdam was bombed by both sides in their comings and goings. We saw a tower like the Calgary or Toronto towers---actually it probably is more like the Seattle space needle as it goes up and down. In different places along the harbour, there were huge platforms for ship repair. We saw an oil rig being repaired in dry dock. Where the ships were being loaded with cargo containers, they were using cranes, front end loaders and the claw kind of pettibones like Art used to use at the spur in Wabowden. They said there were a millions containers here at any time. These containers are the size of a train car. Some ships can carry 80,000 containers. I saw a Cargill storage area like you would see on the prairies. Near the end of the tour we saw mounds of scrap metal from where old vessels were demolished. The tour “voice” said something about making stainless steal from some of the scrap. As we went along this long stretch of water we would see names we recognized as their product was being sent around the world from here. We ended our day going to a restaurant for some delicious ribs—right around the corner from Rebecca’s house. This was an amazing day.