Korenmolen de Zandhaas

One of our "must visits" in the Netherlands is Korenmolen de Zandhaas. This working grinding mill has a wonderful selection of baking products to buy (that we can't get in America), plus they invite you to climb up and view the workings of the mill. These things are truly amazing machines that were clearly the "engines" of the economy of their time. I really wonder why they faded from common use - I suppose that steam power (and later electric) really does have benefits, but it's not obvious when you are in the belly of this beast. It seems like if you updated the construction materials to concrete and steel that you'd have an incredibly efficient, and modern, platform for powering your needs.

 

When we visited this mill in 2012, we had a terrible time finding it. Things just don't look the same on the ground as they do on the map, and coming from Haarlem we missed a turn. This time we did it the other way around - go to the mill first, then go to Haarlem.

The reason for going to Haarlem was to visit the Frans Hals Museum.

On the way home, we got stuck in a "file" - a traffic jam. This resulted (finally) in a detour through Alphen aan den Rijn, where we had stayed in a B&B in 2008. There was a recent accident a few blocks away when some cranes handling a new bridge deck were tipped over and landed on some buildings, along with the bridge deck. Here is the street view at the point where we had walked just a couple of years before.

The orange is part of the bridge deck. A month after the accident, it looks like nothing has moved. Fortunately, no one was killed. Here's a video of the accident.