Summer Trip to Greece

At the last minute, we decided to take a short trip in June.  Lori had to work, so it was Grant, Kate and myself.  Our selection criteria for the vacation were:  warm weather, scuba diving school and flights available (since we were planning this w/ one week lead time).  The island of Rhodes, Greece matched those criteria plus it came with an added bonus -- our friends, the Sechlers, would be there for part of our stay.  How could we pass it up? 

The city of Lindos going down to the coast.  With the white washed buildings and crystal clear water is was just what you expected from Greece. 

The Acropolis at Lindos

When I mentioned our criteria of "flights available" you'll notice that I didn't save "flights available on major airlines".  This was our first experience on a European discount airline, in this case Transavia.com.  The airline actually turned out to be fine - clean planes, on-line check-in, etc.  The only surprise was that they counted anything larger than a cell phone as carry-on luggage and you could only have one carry-on bag,  So we had to pay to check our suitcases.  It's amazing how quick you can load a plane when no one has any carry on luggage. 

Our biggest challenge was getting to the plane.  I tried the economy parking lot for the first time, which was described on the Schiphol website as "minutes away from the Departures Area".  The actual transfer bus departure point was only "minutes away".  Unfortunately, the parking lot was about 500 acres and very full, so to get from our parking spot in the back 40 to the transfer bus was a healthy walk.  Plus we foolishly thought that the aiport wouldn't be busy at 5:00 am (we had a 6:30 am departure).  It turned out to be packed as many other families were traveling that day as well.  In the end we made it to the plane with 15 minutes to spare. 

Back to Rhodes.  It's an island of about 100,000 people in the Agean Sea.  It's closer to Turkey (10 miles) that it is to Athens (250 miles).  Historically it has been very agile in switching alliances to the strongest countries at the time, bouncing between Athens, Sparta, the Persians and Rome.  In more modern times, Italy siezed control of Rhodes from the Turks in 1912.  Then, as part of the Allied Peace Treaty, Rhodes was given to Greece in 1947. 

A view of the inland part of Rhodes.

Kate resting in Old Rhodes Town

As you can see, a few other people were seeking the sun. Luckily, we didn't beach here. We had to walk through here to get to our Scuba Diving boat.

The island was home to the Colossus of Rhodes, a 32 meter bronze statue of Helios, the Sun God.  Built in 300 BC to commemorate a battle victory, it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.   Unfortunately, there won't be any pictures of it on the blog -- it was destroyed by an earthquake in 225 BC.    St. Paul is said to have visited Rhodes.  And for one final Rhodesian fact, per the Encyclopedia Britannica, the island was infested by snakes in ancient times and even today farmers still wear leather boots for protection agains the poisonous snakes.  Funny how that wasn't mentioned in the tour books. 

One of our favorite restaurants, a typical Greek Taverna.

Rather than try to expain the menu to non-Greek speaking Americans, the waiter simply took all six of us to the kitchen and showed us what was available that evening.

Eating with Caroline, Carol & Mark Sechler

This seafood restaurant dried the octopus right by patio.

We had a great time on the island.  The sun shone every day.  Grant completed his scuba diving certification.  Kate and I did five dives, including two wreck dives.  The sunken boat was Dutch built, but the Dutch divemaster was quick to point out that was not why it sank (he never did say why it sank). 

Grant with his dive instructor, Jerry (who happened to be Dutch).

The dive school caters to people from all over Europe

The dive shop closed on Sundays, so we had a day to sightsee in Old Rhodes Town.  It is enclosed by massive walls and filled with winding streets and alleys.  The Knights of St. John ruled the island for 200 years beginning in the early 1300's and turned this area into a fortress to protect ships from the Turks.   Within the Old Town is the Palace of the Grand Masters.  It was built in the 14th century, but severely damaged by a Turkish siege and then destroyed by an explosion (another reminder of the dangers of gunpowder storage) in the mid-1800s. The Italians completely rebuilt it during their control of the island. It was intended as a holiday home for Mussolini and King Emmanuel III.

Cannon balls in the dry moat area.

Kate and Grant at one of the gates to the Old City.

All the streets in the Old City were narrow and winding.

These vines make it tough to see the street sign. 

With Lori's absence, Kate stepped up to chief tour guide. 

The interior courtyard of the Palace of the Grand Masters

Entryway to the Grand Palace

As part of the Italians' renovations, they moved dozens of 2000 year old floor mosaics from the island of Kos to Rhodes.

Another floor mosaic.

Avenue of the Knights leading from the Grand Palace. The street was divided into seven "tongues," according to the homeland of the knights who lived there. The Grand Master lived in the palace at the top of the hill.

 

 

 

This girl's begging strategy included a puppy and an accordian.  It didn't work very well; her basket is empty. 

Kate and Grant in one of the Old Town squares

We had lunch on the second floor patio of this restaurant. The guy behind Kate is working with his "spotters" in the square below, trying to entice people to come to his restaurant.

The local gelato shop made their flavors look like animals. 



Another gate to the Old Town

One of the Knights of St. John with some tourists

Our return travel was a little challenging.  Our departure date coincided with the protests scheduled in response to Greece's proposed economic austerity measures.  There was no violence on Rhodes, but many employee groups, including the air traffic controllers, went on strike that day from 8 until noon and from 6 until 10 pm.  So our scheduled 9:30 pm flight got pushed back to midnight. 

At 11:00 pm, as we waited for our flight, it was suddenly removed from the schedule board.  Not listed as delayed or cancelled.  Just not listed at all.  That was quite an unpleasant surprise.  And believe it or not, there was no Transavia.com help desk to direct my inquiry -- it closes at 9:00 pm.  After about 45 minutes, it re-appeared on the board with a departure time of 2:30 am.  This delay must have been due to the airline because there was an announcement (in Dutch) followed by cheering.  Then I started seeing a lot of people smiling and carrying sandwiches.  I went to the sandwich counter and asked the lady "Why is everyone getting a sandwich?"  She replied "Yes" and thrust three sandwiches into my hands.   Once again we learned that you get what you pay for.  The bread was rock hard and there was one thin slice of meat on the sandwich. 

We finally departed at the newly scheduled time and arrived in Holland at 5:00 in the morning -- ouch.  It was another "few minutes" back to the parking lot, etc.  We arrived home at 6:30 am, just in time to see Lori off to work and then go to bed.  

This is what an airport check-in area looks like at 9:00 pm when the air traffic controllers are on strike until 10:00 pm. It was totally empty. By 10:30, things were hopping.

The complimentary sandwiches. Yum!

Our hotel had entertainment every night.  One night it was belly dancing.  The only people in the audience were the belly dancer's two granddaughters.  On this night was the Fire Show.  The guy swallowed fire, rubbed it on his arms and chest, put it out with his hands, etc.  About 15 minutes into the show, the fire alarms all went off.  I guess the hotel forgot about that aspect of the Fire Show. 



We discovered many cats during our walk through the old city of Rhodes.  If you look closely at this photo you can see the cat jumping from the electrical wires to the roof. 

This guy was sleeping on a ledge when we walked by.

When we walked by 10 minutes later he had changed ledges. 

Do you think he stays on when it's going?

Happy Birthday Mom!

Today my Mother celebrates her 80^th birthday.  As is typical on most of her birthdays, she won’t be opening a card from me.  I usually send her a card; it’s just rarely on time.  It’s not that I don’t love her or wish for her to enjoy the day.    Rather, I can never seem to find that card with the perfect message to tell Mom exactly how I feel.  I have a hard time getting excited about cards that say “Many Happy Returns” or “Enjoy Your Special Day” or “Now That You’re 21 You Can Buy Me a Drink”.  The card I’m looking for would say “Happy Birthday Mom.  Thanks for all the letters you’ve written”.   

You see my Mother is a letter writer.  Some parents phone.  Others visit.  Some even Skype.  My mom writes…..very well.   Let me explain. 

When my oldest sister, Anne, went off to college almost 40 years ago, my Mother wrote to her every week.  Every week.  There were still four of us kids at home so she had plenty of subject material, but it had to be extremely challenging to find the time to write. 

The next year my next sister, Carol, started college.  So Mom got out the carbon paper to produce two issues of the weekly news.  Two years later Tom went to school and Mom had to learn to manage two sets of carbon paper.  When Dave and I were in college, she graduated to very thin onion skin paper and extra-strong carbons to be able to produce five legible copies in a single sitting.  It was a tribute to her typing skills that those letters contained so few mistakes – there’s no correction when you’re using carbons. 

All five kids home for Mom's birthday party this summer.  Anne, Carol, Dave, Tom, Mark.

Over the years as more kids left the house, the letters shifted from a recount of home events to a sort of posting of what each of us was doing.  It truly became a family newsletter.  As we graduated and moved to different areas of the country, Mom’s letters kept coming, keeping us connected with her and Dad and with each other.  There was no better way to get over a poor college exam grade or a bad day at work than to come home and find a hand-addressed letter in the mailbox.  Whatever was troubling my mind or was on my to-do list at the time got pushed back so that I could find a comfortable chair, relax and read the family news. 

Mom’s letters were not limited to immediate family.  She wrote regularly to Dad’s parents while they wintered in Florida.  She is known throughout the community for sending cards for birthdays, congratulations, sympathy, etc. – all with a personal note.  And as members of her country church moved to nursing homes, she started a weekly letter to provide church news and keep them connected to each other. 

Mom took full advantage of advances in technology.  When computers came out, she got on board.  What a relief it must have been to go from managing five sheets of paper and four carbons in a typewriter to simply selecting “5” for print quantity.  With the advent of the Internet and email, she stepped up again.  She only had to type in a distribution list, write her note and hit “send”.  And the timing for her learning email was perfect because her distribution list was growing to include grandchildren now at college. 

Mom with the "expanded distribution list", her seven grandchildren.

When I think about how much Mom has written over the years, it’s pretty impressive.  She’s been writing for at least 40 years, 35 letters per year (she did take some weeks off), 500 words per letter – that adds up to a writing career with over 700,000 words.  To put that in perspective the sum of her letters are over 25% longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  They are equivalent to the first five books in the Harry Potter series.  (Granted, our family’s life wasn’t quite as exciting as the adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione.)   

So why does Mom write?  One reason is that she loves us.  Her letters always end with encouraging words and, although they were typewritten, each letter was signed with a hand-written “Love, Nancy”.  

She also writes because it’s hereditary -- her Mother did the same thing.  When Mom left the city and moved 300 miles away to the farm to marry Dad, it had to be a huge change.  Back then phoning was out of the question, so Grandma Voss wrote a weekly letter to keep in touch with her only daughter.  Grandma Voss was still writing those letters by the time I came along and I remember Mom’s joy when we brought one in from the mailbox. 

My Grandmother, June Voss. 

Finally, Mom writes is because she is talented and enjoys it.  Many people may not realize that she is a college-trained, professional writer.  She majored in Technical Journalism at Iowa State.  No, that doesn’t mean she wrote about engineers (now that would be exciting wouldn’t it?)  The “Technical” side of her journalism involved Home Economics and Food Science.  As an aside, while Mom wrote about the goings on in our home, one of her ISU classmates, Hugh Sidey, was writing about the people living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – he covered the White House for Time Magazine for almost 50 years.  

Early in her marriage, Mom put her college diploma to work.  She won a new clothes dryer with a 50-word poem about her then 1 year-old daughter, Anne.  She also had an article published in Farm Journal Magazine titled “When a Town Girl Marries a Farmer”.   But it didn’t take long for the time requirements of farming and raising a family put any chance of a public journalism career on hold.

But the loss for Farm Journal readers was certainly our gain.   Ask any of my siblings and I’m sure they will agree with me that Mom’s letters have meant a lot to each of us.    Unfortunately, we don’t seem to get around to telling her that often enough.  Although she was trained as a technical writer, her true skills lie in her personal touch.  And while being a farm wife was incredibly demanding, she always seemed to find time to spend an hour or so at the typewriter or computer in order to keep her family connected.    

So Mom, here’s your birthday card.  On time.  And it finally says what I've always wanted to say.  Thanks for all the letters!

Roots

Don and Joan's recent visit to the Netherlands was a homecoming of sorts.  You don't have to climb too far up their family trees to find people who lived in Holland, decided to leave for one reason or another and so immigrated to America.  When you hear Don and Joan recount some of the family stories told by their parents, it gives you a real appreciation for the hardships people faced and the courage they displayed.

Don’s father’s family was from the Maasdaam area, which is about an hour south of Den Haag.  They left Holland in 1884 and moved all the way to Holland.....Holland, Michigan that his.  Don’s dad, Adrianus, was around 5 at the time.  Don's grandfather worked for the railroad there.  Unfortunately, he had to work every third Sunday which didn’t please him.  So an aunt sent money to bring the family to Pella, Iowa (another US town with a Dutch heritage that hosts a tulip festival, just like Woodburn, Oregon).   From there it was just a hop, skip and jump over to Prairie City where Don grew up on his dad's farm. 

Lori did some exhaustive research into the Ryerkerk family genealogy (she googled it and some kind soul had posted the entire family tree for the last 600 years).  The starting point seems to be the late 1400's when Jan van Ridderkerk (translated as John from Ridderkerk) comes on the scene.  The town of Ridderkerk still exists today.   

Looks like the folks in Riddekerk need a new sign....or a new target. 

And now for your listening pleasure, directly from the Fatherland....

The family stayed in Ridderkerk for the next 200 years and seemed to develop the habit of using the same names for their sons.  We go from Arien Arensz to Maarten Arienz to Cornelius Maarten to Maarten Cornelius back to Cornelius Maarten and from there we lose the middle names.  However, about every other son after that was named Cornelius.   In the early 1700's they moved to the Maasdam area and in the mid 1800's the name changes to Rijerkerk or Reijerkerk. 

That's the speed limit, not Don's age. 

There is no reason given for the name change, but my guess is poor penmanship.  Some poor village clerk couldn't read Mr. Ridderkerk's writing, so he made a guess and it came out Rijerkerk.  The Dutch are notorious for unreadable signatures; they typically just make two big strokes in random directions followed by microscopic scribbles and call that their signature.

How things went from Rijerkerk to the US version of Ryerkerk is much easier to explain.  The Dutch alphabet doesn't us the "y" as a vowel; they use the "ij" instead for the long i sound.  But when they immigrated to the US, the "ij" went to the typical English spelling of a "y" and the name became Ryerkerk.  In Holland, the name remains Rijerkerk -- in fact, Lori has several official documents where they've used the Dutch spelling of her name (and it's not due to poor penmanship).  As an aside, she also gets challenged when she asks to speak English on the phone.  The reply is often, "But you have a Dutch name, can't you speak Dutch?" 

The local Reformed Church in Maasdam

The cemetary behind the church had two Rijerkerk headstones

The Maasdam countryside. Full of typical Dutch things....windmill, flat land, and water.

 

Joan's mother, Geraldine or Dina, was born in Veenandaal, Holland which is about one and a half hours east of Den Haag.  She came to the US via Ellis Island in 1909 or 1910 with her parents, 6 sisters and 3 brothers.  Geraldine was 5 or 6 years old at the time.  Her mother baked bread for the boat trip and Dina remembered it being moldy and stale by the end of the trip -- but that was what they had to eat, so they ate it.  When they landed at Ellis Island someone gave them bananas to eat.  Having never seen a banana before they didn't know whether to eat the skin, the insides or both.  

The Oude Kerk (Old Church) in Veenandaal.  The town must have been heavily bombed in WWII (it's near Arnhem of A Bridge Too Far fame) because there were almost no other old buildings. 

The family must have known someone in Pella who sponsored them, because they went directly there via train.  Within a year of landing in Pella Dina's dad was pulling out a fence post and died of a heart attack leaving her Mom alone with all those children.  Joan's father, Tim, was born in Pella (which is almost Holland) in 1902.  Tim's father also died young, leaving his wife with 4 children and pregnant with the fifth. 

Joan's heritage is a little tougher to trace.  I don't know if she is hiding something in her past or what, but there seem to be a lot of name changes.  She believes her mother's maiden name was Rouw but we can't find that name in the Ellis Island Registry.  It could have been spelled differently in Holland, i.e. Rau, etc.  Her father's surname was Plate, but that is probably the English version of the Dutch name van der Platts.   In all seriousness these are real examples of what people did to adopt to their new country.

While we were attempting to trace Joan's heritage in Veenandaal, we came across an operating windmill.  Since we hadn't found much else interesting in the town, we pulled in, not knowing if it was open for tourists or not.  When a gentleman came out to see what we wanted, I poured it on, telling him that this woman was visiting Holland for the first time, her mother was born in this town 100 years ago, etc.  He turned out to be a wonderful fellow.  He was an eighth generation miller, he used the windmill to grind grain for animals and he gave us a full tour.  He was another example that everyone from Veenandaal is friendly. 

Three Dutch folks

The miller grasps the vertical stick on the left.  By raising and lowering the stick, the mechanism raises and lowers the grindstone (which is located above the ceiling) to make the grain courser or finer.  The milled grain comes down the chute on the left and the miller constantly monitors it with his hand to verify that he has the correct thickness. 

He demonstrated how he climbs the blades to unfurl the sails.