Hal Jespersen's European Barge Trip, May 2026 [Part 1 via Mark Twain]
What follows are my (Hal’s) notes upon the occasion of my voyage from Amsterdam to Paris aboard the luxury canal barge Aurora, a conveyance arranged through the Hotels Afloat agency—which I commend to the reader as a most felicitous name for such an enterprise. Nancy and I were originally to undertake this adventure together, but she resolved to remain at home and attend to certain persistent health difficulties, dispatching me abroad as one might release a hound that has been penned up overlong. My companions in debauchery are our old friends from Cincinnati, Ray and Pat, who are sensible people and therefore entirely unsuited to refuse a barge trip through Europe.
The report being of considerable length and burdened with photographs taken by means of an iPhone 17 Pro Max—a device of such optical vanity that I am persuaded its lens could detect a flea at forty paces—I have been obliged to divide the whole affair into four parts:
Contents – Part 1: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Willemstad, Antwerp
Thursday/Friday, May 7/8 — to Amsterdam
I engaged United Airlines to convey me direct from San Francisco (SFO) to Schiphol (AMS), the departure being scheduled for early afternoon on Thursday and the arrival for mid-morning Friday—a timetable which the airline regarded as a mere suggestion. The 777-200 presented what the company was pleased to call minor maintenance difficulties, and we spent better than four hours shuttling to and from the gate like a confused sheepdog while various remedies were applied and found wanting. In the end they gave up the ghost entirely on that particular aircraft, rescheduled us for 12:25 in the morning on a fresh aeroplane with a fresh crew, and I arrived in Amsterdam nearly ten hours behind the original program. United, apparently seized by remorse, subsequently gifted me 25,000 mileage points, which I accepted in the spirit in which they were intended.
I had formed plans to visit the nearby town of Haarlem on Friday afternoon and to join our friends for dinner at a celebrated pizzeria called Piccolo Forno—but the delayed schedule deposited me in Amsterdam well after nine in the evening, by which hour both the town and the pizza had gone about their business without me. Ray reported on Facebook that the pizza was excellent, which intelligence burned my bacon considerably. After threading my way through the new European Entry/Exit System at Schiphol—a contrivance not yet fully working, though the lines were merciful, which is more than could be said for baggage claim—I hired an Uber to convey me downtown, noting that the hike from the baggage hall to the pickup point is not less than a kilometer and would have felled a weaker man. For the ensuing two nights I was installed at the Hotel Esthéréa, a seventeenth-century building of small dimensions and considerable charm, perched directly above the Singel canal, which is the city’s oldest and widest, and which smells accordingly.
I wandered through the Friday evening crowds, who were in excellent spirits and making no effort to conceal the fact, and passed Dam Square, which is dominated by the Nationaal Monument op de Dam, unveiled in 1956 to commemorate the victims of World War II—a somber undertaking carried out in the middle of one of Europe’s most cheerful public spaces, which arrangement the Dutch appear to find perfectly natural. Feeling the call of sustenance, I repaired to a small establishment given over to hamburgers, but instead availed myself of bitterballen—the local specialty of gooey meatballs imprisoned in a shell of deep-fried crust of remarkable integrity. They are served scalding hot with mustard, and a man who bites into one without due caution will regret the experience for some minutes. Continuing my inquiry into non-alcoholic beers, I sampled a local brew called Affligem Blonde 0.0, which I found to be quite good, and which I recommend to fellow abstainers.
Saturday, May 9 — Amsterdam Food Tour
A beautiful day, sunny and cool, of the sort that makes a man glad to be alive and abroad in the world. The city offers bakeries and cafes in such abundance as to constitute a positive menace to forward progress. I commenced the morning with a Dutch pancake adorned with bacon and cheese at an establishment called "The Happy Pig," whose proprietors have achieved a name that is simultaneously truthful and aspirational. I then joined my friends—who are lodged at an Airbnb apartment situated at a sensible remove from the tourist precincts in which my hotel is planted—and we enrolled ourselves in a food tour offered by Secret Food Tours, a company whose services I have found agreeable on previous occasions. Our guide was a young Italian gentleman named Lorenzo who commanded English with perfect fluency, though he delivered his remarks in tones so subdued that I was obliged to station myself at close range throughout. We made a number of stops. The first was "’t Westerhuys," a cafe where we were introduced to Poffertjes—the celebrated Dutch miniature pancakes, somewhat larger than a silver dollar and considerably more agreeable. Along the Lindengracht (Linden Canal), Lorenzo related an engaging story about an old tradition in which men competed to jump and seize an eel suspended by a rope above the canal; concerns for the eel’s dignity eventually brought this practice to an end, and in its place arose King’s Day, now the most famous holiday in the Netherlands—which is to say that the Dutch replaced eel-grabbing with a national celebration, and who is to say they chose wrong.
At a shop called JWO Lekkernijen, we sampled four varieties of local cheese, which operation Lorenzo conducted with the gravity appropriate to matters of importance. We traversed the district of Willemsstraat, formerly a slum and now gentrified in the manner of slums the world over—the poor displaced, the rents elevated, and the coffee made smaller and more expensive. We crossed the Brewers Canal past commercial buildings converted to residences, a number of which carry large statues or symbols upon their rooftops to indicate their original commercial purpose, which arrangement gives the neighborhood the appearance of a very large game of charades. At a fishmonger called Vishandel, we sampled raw herring and a lightly fried cod called kibbeling, the latter being superior in every respect to traditional English fish and chips—a judgment I offer without malice toward England, but with fidelity to the facts. At Comestibles Kinders, we had a half sandwich called a Broodje Halfom, a popular street food of Jewish origin containing equal parts pickled and smoked beef (pekelvlees) and cooked veal liver (lever) on a soft white roll—a combination that sounds improbable but acquits itself admirably.
At Blauwe Pan we had a fresh apple pie of decent quality. The day concluded at a wine and liquor establishment where the proprietor—a man of considerable enthusiasm, as though he had been sampling the merchandise—conducted a tasting of jenever, the forerunner of gin, made by distilling malt with juniper berries. I was content to smell it, alcohol and I having parted company. The other members of our party reported that it tasted very good, though none of them thought sufficiently well of it to make a purchase, which I note without drawing conclusions.
I walked back to Dam Square to photograph the war monument in daylight, but found the place occupied by competing political protests—one anti-Israel, the other anti-Russian—conducted in the vigorous Dutch manner. After an interval of rest, my friends and I dined at the restaurant Jansz, which occupies quarters in the Pulitzer Hotel—the very establishment in which Nancy and I lodged at the conclusion of our Christmas market cruise in 2024. A very fine meal. For dessert I located a Stroopwafel shop called Melly’s and had one prepared fresh and warm, ornamented with pistachios and chocolate. Let me be plain: this was not the modest circular wafer that United Airlines distributes to economy passengers as though conferring a benediction, but a construction the size of a salad plate, warm and yielding and altogether magnificent. Quite yummy is an understatement, but I will let it stand.
Sunday, May 10 — Embarking Aurora
Breakfast at the hotel, followed by a short walk to the Grachtenmuseum (Museum of the Canals), which Ray had recommended with the confidence of a man who has done his research. The museum proved to be quite interesting, covering the initial layout of the city, its defenses, the expansion of the canal network, the construction of the houses along the banks, and various modern developments—all presented in a multimedia style so lively and agreeable that one scarcely noticed the instruction taking place. A museum that entertains while it informs is a rare institution and deserves commendation.
After a long ramble about the city by no particular plan, I met Ray and Pat at my hotel, and we were collected by a man named André, who serves the Aurora as driver and—as it developed—sommelier, two roles which one might think incompatible but which he managed without apparent difficulty. André introduced us to our fellow passengers, Gary and Eve from St. Louis, who had sailed with the Aurora previously on a different itinerary and were welcomed back by the crew with the warmth accorded old friends. There are four cabins on the vessel, one remaining unoccupied for this sailing. The captain and chef is an affable New Zealander named Steve—a man who can navigate a waterway with one hand and produce a creditable dinner with the other, which is a useful combination of talents in a barge captain. (Steve insists on calling Aurora a ship, on the grounds that she occasionally ventures beyond inland waterways; I have considered this argument and rejected it, and I shall not hear further discussion on the subject.) His Slovakian wife Karina serves as first mate, her portfolio of duties encompassing the galley, the deck, and tour guiding—which is to say, everything. The crew is completed by a young American named Karolina and a Golden Retriever named Faye, who approaches her professional responsibilities with admirable equanimity.
We were received with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, and I was gratified to find a non-alcoholic sparkling wine had been laid in on my behalf—Steve having himself arrived at that period of life in which alcohol loses its appeal, a development I regard as evidence of sound judgment. I selected my cabin, which is spacious and comfortable, unpacked my belongings for the two-week sailing, and connected to the Starlink-provided Wi-Fi, which furnished approximately 40 megabits per second of download—faster than certain American cities I could name. The other four passengers then departed to admire a windmill and survey downtown Rotterdam, while I exercised the prerogative of a man with well-established priorities and visited the local World War II museum.
The museum is small but excellently executed, built around the collection assembled by a man named Arie Mast, who endured the bombing and occupation as a child and spent a lifetime gathering its artifacts. A substantial section recounts the city’s wartime history in Dutch, though an English translation pamphlet was placed in my hands. A multimedia presentation on the bombing carried emotional weight disproportionate to its duration, which is the highest compliment one can pay such a thing.
Rotterdam had a grievous time of it during the war—enormous destruction from the bombing in May 1940, then the persecution and killing of the Jews, prolonged privation, and near starvation in the final months. Walking back to the boat, I fell into conversation with Steve, who shares my interest in the history of that conflict. In a former life, it emerged, he had been a fighter pilot for the New Zealand Air Force—which goes some distance toward explaining how a man manages to dock a barge in a strong wind with the composure of someone parking a motorcar.
The group assembled for informal cocktails and then sat down to a very fine dinner at seven o’clock. I do not propose to chronicle every meal consumed over the ensuing two weeks, course by course and dish by dish—a project that would tax the reader’s patience and my own memory in equal measure. I will say only that the cooking and service were excellent throughout, with a marked preference for locally sourced ingredients, and leave it at that.
Monday, May 11 — Rotterdam to Willemstad
The beautiful Amsterdam weather has decamped without notice, and today is chilly and overcast, with brief rain showers making their appearance at intervals during the afternoon in the manner of unwelcome relatives. After a solid breakfast we got underway, transiting through a lock into the Nieuwe Maas (otherwise known as the Meuse) River. Although locks were to become a familiar feature of the journey, this first passage caught our attention—the gates closing behind us with a kind of finality, the water adjusting itself, and the gates ahead opening onto a different level of the world, as though the river had taken us into its confidence. We proceeded through the busy Rotterdam harbor and admired the skyscrapers that have risen on ground the Germans obliterated in 1940 and the Allies continued to improve upon for the remainder of the war. There is an interesting bridge called the Erasmusbrug, known locally as the Swan Bridge, which earns the name. We also passed a large replica of Noah’s Ark, a failed tourist attraction, which sits in the water with the mournful dignity of a bad idea that has nowhere else to go. We then turned south on the Noord River.
Our first stop was the city of Dordrecht, the oldest in Holland—noting for the benefit of the literal-minded that Holland and the Netherlands do not denote identical territories, a distinction the Dutch consider important and which I commend to the reader’s attention without undertaking to explain it here. I had visited Dordrecht in December 2024 on a Viking river cruise, though we docked in a different location and the tour on that occasion covered entirely different ground, so there was no repetition of effort. André conveyed us by van to the visitor center while Steve piloted Aurora across waters of some roughness to our second stop of the day. Our guide was a man named Kees, who proved excellent. We examined the city’s distinctive brick facade style, unique among Dutch cities, and visited two old folks’ homes—an institution that in Dordrecht takes the form of large courtyards ringed by small apartments, the courtyards laid out with beautiful trees and gardens of a restfulness that one could find oneself envying prematurely.
We examined a statue of William of Orange, the primary engine of the revolt against Spanish rule—a man who achieved a great deal and whose equestrian likeness stands in numerous Dutch squares practicing the appropriate expression of historical significance. We visited the Old and New Harbor areas and admired the modest yachts at their moorings. In Scheffer Square—named for the painter Ary Scheffer, who was one of the inspirations for Vincent van Gogh—we learned that van Gogh had lodged just down the street for approximately six months before resolving to become an artist, and nearby had served as assistant preacher in a local church, from which position the congregation gently discouraged him from advancing. One reflects that the world owes a considerable debt to those congregants. We passed the Old City Hall, which I found impressive chiefly on account of the magnificent lion statues guarding its entrance. Our final stop was outside the Great Church of Our Lady (Grote Kerk of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk), a large Gothic structure dating from the thirteenth century and looking well for its age.
André collected us at the church and drove to the small town of Willemstad—not to be confused with the principal city of Curaçao, which carries the same name and is in every other respect its opposite. Precisely as we arrived in the parking lot, Aurora hove into view, fighting a stiff headwind and whitecapped waves with the determination of a vessel that knows where it is going and intends to get there. It was a fine thing to watch Steve ease her to the pier through that weather—the kind of seamanship that makes navigation look like an art. We took an unguided walk about the town, which struck me as impeccably maintained, almost like a Dutch village conjured by Disney’s EPCOT designers working from a particularly meticulous brief. The town is arranged in the form of a large star-shaped fortress, surrounded by moats—a layout that is interesting to contemplate and less interesting to circumnavigate, there not being very much to see within it beyond a working windmill. The wind made prolonged idleness inadvisable.
Tuesday, May 12 — Antwerp
An early start under cloudy skies, the day’s business being a lengthy transit to Antwerp. Departing Willemstad, we passed through the Volkerak locks—the largest and busiest inland navigation lock complex in Europe, connecting two significant water bodies in the Rhine-Maas-Scheldt delta of the southwestern Netherlands. To the north lies the Hollandsch Diep, a broad tidal inlet and estuary representing the merged outflow of the Maas and Waal rivers pressing westward toward the sea. To the south lies the Volkerak itself, a former tidal estuary closed off by the Volkerak Dam in 1969 and converted thereby into a controlled freshwater lake connected southward toward the Belgian waterway network. Now, unlike the Panama Canal, which heaves ships 26 meters over the spine of a continent, the Volkerak locks manage a tidal differential rather than a fixed elevation change: the Hollandsch Diep remains tidal, rising and falling with the North Sea, while the Volkerak is held at a stable freshwater level, producing a typical lock differential of one to two and a half meters—a more modest performance, but the canal makes no claims to grandeur and is the more reliable for it.
In the Volkerak we shared the waterway with numerous large cargo ships, all proceeding at a velocity that made our own progress look contemplative. We turned into the narrow Scheldt-Rhine Canal and headed south, passing bird sanctuaries where swans, loons, and entire goose families were conducting their affairs without reference to us. The canal opened briefly alongside a freshwater lake called Zoom Lake (Zoommeer), just behind the Oesterdam. Next came the Kreekrak locks, which separate the freshwater of the lake from the saltwater in the canal. Here we encountered an unforeseen difficulty: one of the locks was broken, and the wait promised to be of such heroic duration that André brought up the van. We then scrambled from the roof of the boat, traversing a narrow wooden beam to reach the shore—an exercise combining the dignity of a ship’s boarding drill with the decorum of a circus act—and drove the rest of the way to Antwerp.
Along the way, the Inland Waterways building presented an arresting study in architectural contrast—its contemporary addition perching atop older stonework like a large diamond that has landed on a medieval foundation and decided to stay, a combination that is either visionary or alarming depending on one’s disposition. In the city itself, a lady named Shabnam conducted us on a walking tour with solid historical knowledge and a gift for the well-placed aside that elevated the whole affair considerably. Our first stop was Het Steen—the oldest surviving building in the city, a squat medieval fortress on the Scheldt waterfront. Outside it stands Lange Wapper, a large bronze figure from Flemish folklore: a shape-shifting giant reputed to menace drunken residents returning from the waterfront, rendered here in a posture that is simultaneously comic and unsettling, as all good monsters ought to be. Against this particular monster, the citizens of Antwerp mounted hundreds of statues of the Madonna and the Christ child about the town, which arrangement suggests that Antwerp once had considerably more giants than is now the case.
One of the guild houses near the harbor belonged to the butchers, its facade executed in alternating red and white brick in a pattern the locals call the bacon style—which is either a culinary tribute or evidence that the guild had a sense of humor about their profession, and possibly both. The building now houses a collection of musical instruments, which is a more pacific use of the space. Napoleon, in his systematic reorganization of everything he encountered, ordered the city’s medieval canals bricked over; they continue to run beneath the streets to this day, and an underground tour takes visitors through the vaulted passages, which I mention for those who prefer their history underground as well as above it.
The Grote Markt was the scene of the Spanish Fury of 1576, when mutinous Spanish troops massacred several thousand citizens in an afternoon’s work that effectively ended Antwerp’s career as the commercial capital of northern Europe. The square's Brabo Fountain, cast in 1887 by the sculptor Jef Lambeaux, depicts the legendary Silvius Brabo in the act of flinging the severed hand of the giant Druon Antigoon into the Scheldt—the story held, with a fancifulness the Belgians appear to find perfectly reasonable, to explain the city's name, and images of hands appear throughout the city in consequence. The Grote Markt is surrounded by handsome Renaissance buildings of a quality that prompted Ray—a man not given to extravagant statement—to observe that walking through these streets was like visiting a real medieval city. It is, and the observation is correct.
The St. Charles Borromeo Church (Sint-Carolus Borromeuskerk) was completed by the Jesuits in 1621, and Peter Paul Rubens supplied thirty-nine ceiling paintings for the interior—a commission of no small ambition. A lightning-caused fire in 1718 destroyed every last one of them, leaving the church as a handsome and somewhat melancholy reminder of what the world lost in an afternoon, which is one of the cruelest things fire has ever done to art.
The Cathedral of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal) is the largest Gothic church in Belgium, and hosts four Rubens paintings, among them The Descent from the Cross. Only one of the two planned towers was ever completed; that tower is owned by the city rather than the church, an arrangement dating to the Napoleonic period—Napoleon having apparently concluded that if he could not have the tower, neither could the church, which is exactly the kind of administrative disposition one might expect from him. Nearby stands a poignant white marble monument of the boy Nello and his dog Patrasche, taken from the now-obscure 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders. The statue was created by the artist Batist "Tist" Vermeulen and inaugurated in 2016, depicting the orphan boy and his loyal dog sleeping beneath a cobblestone blanket—for the story ends with both of them freezing to death, having been accidentally locked in the cathedral over Christmas, which is the kind of denouement that makes one question the competence of the cathedral's closing staff. The monument draws a steady procession of Japanese visitors, for whom the story—disseminated through anime—carries an emotional weight that their tears confirm. One cannot help feeling that the Belgians are mildly puzzled by this, but they have the good manners not to show it.
The restaurant district nearby presents abundant and attractive options to the visitor, but I cut short my hour in the cathedral and directed myself to the House of Waffles on Shabnam's recommendation, where I had a Brussels-style Belgian waffle and a hot chocolate. The waffle was delicious. The hot chocolate, I should note, was served in a fashion I have not previously encountered and which is documented photographically below for the benefit of those who, like myself, find such things worth recording. (In retrospect, I ought to have ordered the darker Liège style, but I do not dwell on regret.) André presently collected us in the van and we drove downriver to rejoin Steve and the Aurora, who had been obliged to wait five hours to clear the lock—a circumstance that Steve received with the equanimity of a man who has learned that waterways operate on their own schedule. Back on board, we sailed an hour through the immense and labyrinthine port of Antwerp, navigating its bridges and locks without incident, and at last reached a calm enclave called Kattendijkdok, where we docked for the night. Dinner featured Osso Buco that I will say, without qualification, was the finest I have consumed in a life that has not been lacking in opportunities to form such judgments.
