Sail Amsterdam

Last week was “Sail Amsterdam 2005”. This huge boating festival was started in 1975 to celebrate the 700 year anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam. But because the city is still a Maritime hub and Amsterdamers are always looking for an excuse to throw a large street party, the festival now runs every 5 years. It all starts with a “Sail-In” parade from the North Sea. The ships gather in Ijmuiden then work their way through the sea canal to Amsterdam. Beth and I thought that this would be a great way to have a picnic lunch and watch the ships go by. We biked up the week before the parade and found a perfect spot to view the ships.

A few people that we mentioned our plans to said that we should probably leave for the parade a bit early to get our spot because it “might” be crowded. On the day of the parade we awoke to beautiful blue skies and comfortable warm temperatures. I talked Beth into playing hooky from work for few hours and we packed up our picnic basket and headed for the Sea Canal around 11:00 AM….it’s about a 15 minute bike ride.

Damn!!!! It started getting busy on the bike trails only 100 meters from our house. By the time that we reached the small village of Spaarndam, the halfway point, we were stuck in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen (all bicycles of course). It took us about 45 minutes to get to the canal and we had to park our bikes 2 kilometers away and walk in the last bit. There were several HUNDRED THOUSAND people lining the banks of the waterway to watch the parade. Needless to say, our little picnic spot was already taken.

But also “needless to say”, we had a great time! We pushed and squeezed our way to the banks of the dyke, using all those valuable skills learned while navigating our way through bars and flooded fraternity houses back at IUP (Lambdi Chi for our fellow IUPers). Our timing was impeccable. We found a beautiful spot that was just vacated by a family whose cherubic little kids were throwing temper tantrums and being dragged screaming from the festival. We spread our blanket, opened our bottle of wine, ate our cheese sandwiches and chatted with our picnicking Dutch neighbors, who had lived in America for 10 years and were very grateful to be rid of their earlier neighbors. They’ve been coming to the festival since it started in 1975 and gave us a great deal of history on the event and the ships that we were seeing.

As always, the pictures don’t really capture the magnificence of the event, but I’ve posted a few for you to get a feel for it. For those who may be interested, there are some better aerial photos on the official web site http://www.sail.nl/

Haarlem Jazz? This is a huge street party in our own little town of Haarlem that also took place last week. I don’t have any photos, and you’ve probably already read your limit with the Sail-In description above. So I’ll keep it brief and just tell you that the night started out meeting a group of friends at a great little watering hole called “Fidel’s”….as in Castro…and ended up 6 hours later listening to Disco-Jazz on one of 7 stages set up around the city. Of course there was a lot of other music and maybe “a few” drinks in between. But no evening out is ever really complete without the late night bike ride home through the quiet streets of North Haarlem. The only sound is the creaking of your bike, muffled slightly by the damp sea air gliding coolly past your face. Gezellig.