Dr. Rudy and his daughter, who were standing with Denise and Catherine and the same short guy she’d seen sitting with them the night before. Catherine was wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a bright red coat with a hood that made her easy to spot while her friend Denise was looking stylish in a black raincoat, cinched tightly to show off her skinny waist, worn over leopard-print leggings and knee-high boots. When Sophie was old she wanted to be Denise.
“Welcome to Kinderdijk,” their tour guide said to everyone. “We are the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands. We are below sea level so we have claimed this land from the sea. To do that you must build a dike around the water. Then the water is pumped out, leaving us land to work. This land is called a polder.”
“Interesting,” Sierra murmured.
Sophie didn’t care about the whys and hows. She just wanted to see inside a windmill.
“You may be wondering why this name,” said their tour guide. “I will tell you. This means ‘children dike.’ And that is because of the baby that was found back in 1421. During the Saint Elizabeth’s flood the Grote Hollandse Waard flooded,” she continued with a sweep of her hand. “When the storm subsided, a villager went to the dike between these two areas to see what could be salvaged and in the distance he saw a wooden cradle floating on the water. As he came nearer he saw a cat was on it, trying to keep its balance by jumping back and forth. This was making the cradle rock. When he got closer he saw there was a baby inside. The cat had kept it safe. That story has been published in English as The Cat and the Cradle. Now, come with me and I will show you our windmills.”
The group fell in line, like so many ducklings. There were sure a lot of them. “Let’s move closer,” Sophie said to her sister, then took Sierra’s hand and swam up toward the front of the line in the hopes of latching on to the good doctor.
“Hi, everyone,” she said brightly to the group. “Did you all sleep well last night?”
“Like a rock,” said Denise.
The man next to her said, “Me, too. Call me Rocky.”
“Rocky,” Sophie repeated.
“Actually, my name’s Charlie,” he said. “I have a sick obsession with word play. And you, oh flower of youth, are...?”
“Sophie,” she said with a smile. “And this is my sister, Sierra,” she added, pulling Sierra closer.
“Names as lovely as the women who bear them,” Charlie said. He reminded Sophie a little of one of her uncles, good-natured and full of flattery. Wouldn’t he like to get together with Catherine?
“Are you feeling better?” Catherine asked her.
She wished it had been Dr. Rudy asking, but she smiled and said that she was. “The fresh air did the trick. Thanks to your advice,” she said to him.
“Good,” he said. “It’s no fun to be sick when you’re traveling.”
“No, it isn’t. And I do want to travel more,” Sophie said. “You like to travel, don’t you, Doctor?”
“Please call me Rudy,” he said. A good beginning.
“Rudy,” she said, and smiled at him.
“Yes, I do. You always meet the nicest people,” he added, and smiled. At Catherine.
Athena frowned. So did Sophie. This was going to be an uphill battle.
Following their tour guide, they strolled along a paved walk, picturesque with plots of green and ancient windmills laid out between canals, reeds of some sort clinging to the banks. “I grew up swimming in this canal,” said their tour guide. “In winter we skated on it.”
“Like Hans Brinker,” murmured Catherine.
“Ah, yes,” said Rudy.
Who the heck was Hans Brinker?
“Here in Kinderdijk the Lek and Noord rivers meet,” their guide continued. “Our battle with the sea became more and more of a problem as time went on, and in the thirteenth century canals were dug to get rid of the excess water. After a few centuries a new way was thought of to keep the polders dry. Our fathers decided to build a series of windmills to pump water into a reservoir. The water could be let out into the river through locks whenever the river level was low enough. This way we kept our land for farming. We will be going into a windmill now so you can see how the families lived.”
Finally. “Going inside a windmill,” Sophie said eagerly to her sister. “How many people ever get to say they did that?”