Leaving the hotel at 10.30, we started on what proved to be a very pleasant drive to Leeuwarden, passing en route through the bulb fields around Haarlem, where miles of red, white, blue and yellow patches arrest the eyes. Then on to Alkmaar, renowned for its cheese market, where the square is yellow with cheese stacked like piles of ammunition. Continuing, we arrived at the new road across the Zuyder Zee.

The Zuyder Zee reclamation scheme is the greatest of its kind ever known, and the progress already made entitles it to be described as one of the engineering wonders of the world. Work was commenced in 1920, and the whole scheme will be completed in 1952 at a cost of about £80,000,000. It will increase the total area of Holland by about 7 per cent.-  i.e., an area equal to about six times that of the Isle of Wight. No less than 48,000 acres have already been reclaimed and cultivated, so that land which less than three years ago was at the bottom of the sea is now smiling countryside, dotted with spick-and-span villages.

The first part of this gigantic undertaking was the construction of an enormous dyke across the northern part of the Zuyder Zee, in order to cut it off from the North Sea and convert it into a lake. This dyke is already completed, and the fact that it is over 20 miles long, has been built up from the bottom of the sea, and carries a very wide, modern motor road, gives some idea of the immensity of this comparatively small part of the under­taking as a whole. Many millions of tons of filling material were employed, consisting of sunk-weighted brushwood mattresses, stones, loam of glacial origin, sand, boulder clay, cement, basalt, brick, etc. In view of the fact that rivers flow- into it, part of the enormous area thus enclosed will remain a freshwater lake and sluices have been built into the great dyke, so as to allow overflow water to reach the North Sea. The remaining area is being enclosed and drained and the result will, in 1952, be as already stated. It is estimated that over 300,000 people will be permanently employed on the reclaimed land, and it is easy to visualise the large numbers who are being and will be employed by the scheme itself, the building of many new villages and indirectly by the many industries which are automatically involved.

It is indeed a great scheme and a permanent monument to Dutch technical skill and undaunted perseverance in the face of seemingly insuperable difficulties. It is also a splendid example of economic wisdom on the part of the Netherlands Government.

After crossing the dyke, a stop was made at Harlingen, a quaint little seaport, remarkably clean, with a network of canals. Tea was served at the local hotel.

Harlingen is probably the third town built on this site. The first was swallowed up in the great inundation which practically formed the Zuyder Zee in the fourteenth century, and again 200 years later Harlingen was engulfed. Stout dykes now protect the coastline.​​