If there’s one thing I regularly do on trips it’s to get out on the water. Maybe it’s one of the corny DUKW amphibious landing craft tours of Boston, or it’s a whale-watching trip in Hawaii, or even the jet boat rides here at home on the Willamette River, but I love cruising through a town by boat. Amsterdam, of course, offers an array of water-related transport options, but when I saw that there were Russian-built Voshkod hydrofoils cruising between Amsterdam and IJmuiden-Velsen it didn’t matter at all that I had no idea where IJmuiden-Velsen was (it’s on the North Sea coast).
Barbara and I had been on a hydrofoil before, for the long ride from Seattle to Victoria, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Half an hour out, half an hour back, along a heavily-industrialized canal, with IJmuiden-Velsen at the other end! We got out there with no real plan or idea of what we could do, managed to order some fries and wonderful curry ketchup at a stand (passed on the herring) at the dock, and headed back with another a tick off my checklist ten years ago today.
Call us troglodytes, we did not visit the Rijksmuseum. If you look at the prow of the Archimedes (now, apparently, retired from service) you’ll see a bunch of dents. I guess zooming through trafficed canals at 40mph can lead to problems.
The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.