September 18-19 Locked in Lock 11

Well we survived the night in lockdown!  It started raining around 21:00 and rained all night.  Other than hearing the rain and the water rushing in the dam beside us, it was quiet.  After breakfast, we decided to take a walk with our fellow inmates on Barry Duckworth, James and Amanda.  It looked like we might get some more rain but the sun finally won out.  We did a lot of walking and up and down some steep hills.  At least we got some exercise and our fit bits told us 17,000 steps!  We stopped in at McDonalds as it was at the top of a hill and was lunchtime.  So hey, why not? Here are some photos of our day out and about in Amsterdam.

Mike and James walking ahead to what we thought may be a mall.  Turned out to be all offices.

The library here is getting a facelift

Post Office

Presbyterian Church

City Hall

Beautiful homes

Steep hills

A waterfall

Pretty wildflowers and golden rod

This house is certainly ready for Halloween

We returned from our walk and back to our lockdown

The lockmasters were up on the dam structure today closing the gates.  The head lockmaster told us that they lowered the water 8 feet.  And south of us got 4 inches of rain.  They are very cautious now as they had a bad hurricane in 2009 and then hurricanes Irene and Lee back to back in 2011 took out their lock buildings and a lot of this dam.  So he said his priority was keeping us safe.  Nothing was going to happen to us on his watch!

Mike had to get into the dinghy on the dinghy tow to pump out the water from the rain.

On the 19^th in the afternoon, they told us to back out of the lock upstream so that they could get their workboat into the lock and head downstream to check for logs and debris.  Yay!  Out of lockdown! And we will head downstream.  We don’t have a lot of cell service here.  Our view tonight, looking eastbound toward lock 11.

And a beautiful sunset to the west.

My quote of the day on my daily calendar was:

A wonderful thing about laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. 

John Cleese

This quote is another reminder that laughter brings people together and it’s good for the soul.  Yes, we spent three nights here that we certainly didn’t plan on but things happen.  As the saying goes, “we may as well laugh as cry”.  May we all laugh loud and laugh often.