Rie and her friends will also be traveling to Holland for a couple weeks.  They plan to visit the village that Rie lived in as a child, and intend to stay a while at "The Polders."  The Polders is the large area of land that is being reclaimed by man made dikes from the former Zuider Zee (sea).   A dike separating the Polders from the sea was completed in 1932, when work was begun to drain about 225,000 hectares (about 556,000 acres) to form reclaimed land known as Polders. About 3/4 of the area had been reclaimed by the early 1980s.  The remaining freshwater lake is called the IJsselmeer. This shallow freshwater lake in NW Holland was created when much of the Zuider Zee was cutoff from the North Sea by two dams totaling 19 miles in length.   Not only did the sea water have to get pumped out but soil had to be brought in to cover the old sea floor.
Finally to wind up their trip they will be goofing off in France before coming back home to Juneau.