Trips -N - Ships

With the bitter winter that the Netherlands is experiencing, I’m not sure just how many maritime museums and ships I will see, but  I do have plans to see a few. The easiest and first one on my list is to get aboard the Amsterdam, a museum ship replica of an East Indiaman that is docked close to the city’s Centraal Station. What sucks is that the National Maritime Museum, one of the best in the world, will be closed for renovation until at least 2010. Anyone got any contacts to get me a sneak peak tour?

Close to Amsterdam in the new province of Flevoland is the Batavia Werf, a shipbuilding musuem that has already built the replica VOC ship Batavia. They are about halfway through the construction of the De 7 Provinciën, a 17th century ship-of-the-line and I’m really looking forward to checking out shipbuilding on this scale.

For my daytrip to Rotterdam that I have planned there is another ship being built in the section known as Delfthaven - where some of the Pilgrims departed on their way to the New World. There the 18th century ship-of-the-line De Delft, is currently being built year-round by a group of about 200 volunteers. Besides getting to take a look at traditional shipbuilding, I will also hopefully get some great view of Rotterdam’s busy harbor - The biggest in Europe and I believe second only to Shanghai.

These are the biggest projects I’m going to visit, but hopefully I’ll have time and money to see more Dutch maritime heritage while I’m there…