We set off early to walk to the station and catch a bus to Oosterbeek, where the Airborne Museum is housed in the the very building that was General Urquhart's headquarters during the Battle of Arnhem:
Outside they have a contemporary photo of him standing in front of the building. You can see why they cast Sean Connery in the role in the film:
We were delighted to see a party of Dutch schoolchildren getting a dramatic account of the events of 1944. It was clear from the introductory video that the local people still greatly care about what happened in their city 72 years ago, and annually honour the dead in the war cemetery in Oosterbeek.
The exhibition was both interesting and harrowing in parts. Plenty of historic photos, together with uniforms, guns, bombs etc. In the basement, three levels down, there was an extraordinary reconstruction of the battle. The scenes were peopled by life-sized models and made more terrifying by sound and light effects. Almost impossible to photograph, even with a flash, but Diana caught this one:
On our way back from the museum, we tried to photo a splendid scene glimpsed on the way out: a farmer had planted two large parasol umbrellas in his field, and a couple of cows were enjoying the shade beneath. However, the bus was going too fast and the cows had moved. So its left to the imagination.
After a glass of wine and an early lunch back at the boat, we set off, still upstream and it was slow going for the first hour. We had time to enjoy this houseboat: it looked as if the owner had an expanding family!
Eventually we reached the point where the Ijssel river branches off from the Neder Rhine, turned the corner, and suddenly we were dancing downstream at about 15 kph, throttled well back and letting the current work for us for a change.
We did discover that the winding Ijssel encourages blue-boarding (described in our Rhine blog a couple of years back). For the uninitiated, if a barge coming upstream wants to cross to the "wrong" side of the river, to use the slacker current on the inside of a bend for example, he hangs a square blue board on the right (starboard) side of his wheelhouse. Anyone coming downstream has to move over smartly to their "wrong" side. The process is always a little fraught since you are travelling so fast downstream in these conditions. Anyway, here are a couple of blue-boarders we met this afternoon:
The river is running fast and the water level is high, though you can see it has been higher. This tree seemed somewhat marooned:
We pulled into a charming and welcoming harbour near the centre of the Hanseatic town of Zutphen at about 5 p.m.
Tomorrow the idea is to take the train to the famous Kroller-Muller Museum in the morning, then explore Zutphen in the afternoon and stay here a second night. With electricity and water paid for, the washing machine is already running!
No comments:
Post a Comment