Mon, 14 Jul 2003

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Germany
posted 18:53 16/07/03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Netherlands/Netherlands 2 ( all photos )

Groeningen and Surrounds ( 2 photos )
Since the weather is so fantastic at the moment (25-30 degrees each day), we decided this morning would be a great one for sunning on the beach. This we did before breakfast, taking the short walk down to the river beach and reading books for a while.
We considered a swim but the water was quite murky (ok, and too cold), so we just relaxed for a while instead.
Finally getting ourselves organised, we cooked breakfast then headed on the road to find a supermarket which would now be open. This search brought us to the city of Groningen, where a few driving manouevers of questionable legality and waiting a long long time for lock gates to open brought us to a supermarket. It had taken Liz's sharp eyes to find it, as we have no idea what the names of the supermarkets are, and this one only gave away its presence by the posters offering cheap deals on Pringles on the outside.
Wandering around the place was great fun - some things are easy to pick while others remain a total mystery. Also strange is that this place took no credit cards, or our EFTPOS-style switch card! We had to delve into the secret cash stah we have to pay for our goods at the checkout, making it by one euro cent. Phew!
After a lunch in the carpark, a drive to the bank was high on the priority list, so we stumbled across one of those which conveniently allowed us to execute a U-turn and get back on track.
There was not much more for us to do now except drive East into Deutschland (Germany).

author Tim	location Bremen, Germany
posted 09:39 15/07/03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Netherlands/Netherlands 2 ( all photos )

Northern Netherlands ( 8 photos )
A bit of a driving day this one, we headed first for an interesting feature on our map - a fourty kilometre or so long causeway joining the provinces of Noord-Holland and Friesland. Called Afsluitdijk, it was quite interesting to drive along. About a third of the way across there was an information centre where we found out that it was actually a dam, created to increase farming land. The scale of the thing was quite impressive, and driving along it the road in the distance shimmered as if not there. As in many other places here, there are bridges that open up while yachts sail through, leaving the motorists to get out of the cars and wander around for a while, which is a pleasant change from the monotony of diriving around.
With no fixed plan and only knowing that we needed a supermarkt to take on supplies, we headed into the town of Leeuwarden for a bit of a wander. Finding a supermarket when you have no idea what they are called can be a bit tricky. Eventually taking the easy option and pulling into a service station, we were directed to one but told to expect it closed as it was a Sunday. This turned out to be true, so we headed onwards.
Heading up to the coast, we pulled into the town of Holwerd for a look around. Seemingly completely devoid of life, it was still nice to look at the way the gardens are all immaculate and the streets perfectly clean.
From there, we headed out to the ferry port for the little island of Ameland. There was a huge car park, almost completely full for day-trippers to the island. Being reasonably late in the day by now, we had no real desire to head over. Instead, we marvelled at the children playing in the mud, while their respective adults sat on the wharf as if were a beach, getting a tan.
We headed a little further along the coast to the holiday town of Lauwersoog. Like almost every town along the coast here, it had a caravan park which looked good enough for us. For no real reason over any other, we pulled into Camping Lauwersoog. While Liz negotiated to get a site in the reception, I negotiated the children on ride-on toys and adults with much bigger toys in the form of massive caravans to hold a place in the entry queue.
This done, we pulled into a cosy spot where someone else had taken our power connection. The standard "do you speak English?" asked, we had actually found someone who didn't very well for the first time. We managed to gesticulate and use nouns and verbs enough for me to discover that his connection wasn't working. After he plugged back into it though, it seemed fine this time.
While Liz had a walk around the site, I managed to fall asleep in the afternoon for the first time in ages, soaking up the sun and narrowly avoiding getting burnt.
Dinner cooked from what little supplies we had remaining, we watched half of Lord of the Rings on DVD before night-time beckoned us to sleep.

author Tim	location Bremen, Germany
posted 09:11 15/07/03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Netherlands/Netherlands 2 ( all photos )

Amsterdam ( 16 photos )
Getting ourselves organised, we were on the road again for the reasonably short drive to Amsterdam. Of course, we had been here before, but that was mostly a social visit, where we had decided not to see any of the touristy sites. That's why we were back this time.
As always, we needed a place to stay, so we drove to Camping Vliegenbos, the only camp site in Amsterdam. As you might expect, this meant that the prices were high and conditions not ideal. Infact, we were camped in no better than a parking lot, surrounded by other people in tents and a few in motorhomes. That's what you can get away with if you are the only camp site in a big city, I guess.
Still, it was a convenient ten minute bus ride from Centraal Station, which we took to start our wandering around. Without going into "we walked left, then turned right" detail, our day was a lot of wandering, sitting in cafes, enjoying the amazing hot weather in a beautiful city.
We took in some of Amsterdams more interesting museums, the Schuttersgalerij (Civic Guard Gallery withh huge paintings), ate some hot chips (they seem to love them over here), tried to get into Anne Frankhaus (the house of Anne Frank of "The Diary of Anne Frank" fame) but thought the hour-long queue was a bit excessive, especially since the place looked more like a modern art museum from the outside than a well-preserved historical building.
Lunch was at a nice back-street cafe-bar on Spuistraat.
There was a strange guy in a little boat on one of the canals who played the organ and trumpet at the same time, serenading a wedding party in a most unusual way. Great entertainment.
We found a modern bar which also doubled as an Internet cafe where I did some uploading and email sending while Liz wandered the streets taking it all in. She located a part of the city where there was some good foot to be had, so we headed there and found great Tapas for dinner overlooking the busy Nieuwendikj and sipping sangria at Joselito Tapas cafe.
For our return home, we tried the free method - a ferry across the picturesque harbour with the locals, then a GPS-aided walk back to the campsite. Worked a treat, gave us some exercise and proved a good way to see the city.

author Tim	location Lauwersoog, Netherlands
posted 11:01 14/07/03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Netherlands/Netherlands 2 ( all photos )

Den Haag ( 19 photos )
Getting ourselves out of bed and organised, we checked out of the camp ground and parked about 100m up the road. We did this due to the fact that there was a bus from the campsite right into the centre of Den Haag, which we spent the day looking around.
The city is amazingly beautiful, there are tree-lined cobble-stone streets, sculpture exhibitions all around, and plenty of on-street cafes to while away the hours.
Our bus dropped us off conveniently not too far from our first museum of the day - one of the three royal palaces (Het Paleis Lange Voorhout) which houses exhibitions. The walk there was along one of these nice streets with lots of interesting sculptures to look at.
The one we were looking at was Escher in het Paleis. This exhibition was of original prints, drawings and sketches of Escher, famed for his perspective drawings and metamporphisms. Great stuff, and by the end a couple of prints. There were some clever interactive displays around.
The accordian player right outside the door encouraged us to sit and have a light lunch at the cafe there, complete with its own funky sculpture. Interestingly, after being in the UK for so long everything here seems reasonably priced.
From there we basically wandered around the city for a while, up to the tourist information centre, or VVV as they are called in The Netherlands. We were trying to find an Internet cafe but decided to wait another day.
Eventually, we found our way back to the bus stop (via the very pretty houses of parliament - Den Haag is the political capital of The Netherlands - set right on a lake-with-fountain in the middle of town). Three more strips on the Stripkaart each later (that's how you do most public transport here), and we were back at Rosie.
We had a quick wander along the beach there, but it appeared to be closed, so our swimming had to wait until another day. Plus the water was cold too, which may have helped our decision just a little.
We had found another caravan park on the other side of town, which was more of a "just the site, thanks" park than the all-singing, all-dancing, all-charging one we had stayed at the previous night. On the way, however, we stopped off to take in a couple more of the museums that Den Haag is so famous for - Fotomuseum Den Haag and the contemporary art museum GEM. These easy to find but hard to park at museums, which we accessed by dodging across the ever-present tram lines, were interesting, but not amazingly so. The exhibitions in both were fairly startling to say the least, but proved a pleasant way to kill a few hours before heading to our new campsite.
Camping Duinhorst was tucked away in a wood on the outskirts of the city, but the signs once again guided us in with no problems. Another busy site, we spent the evening trying to play table football (it didn't work properly though), reading, doing lots of what holidays are about - nothing.
As an aside, the North Sea Jazz Festival started in Den Haag this evening and ran through the weekend, but the prices were way out of our budget. Quite a shame, but it would have cost us something like 75 euros each to see some of the big names. Next time maybe.

author Tim	location Amsterdam, Netherlands
posted 23:02 12/07/03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Netherlands/Netherlands 2 ( all photos )

Another Ferry ( 3 photos )
(Continued from Across England)
This ferry was different to the one that took is to Ireland and back in several respects, not the least that all our meals were included in the price. We had actually organised quite a good deal with the Caravan Club, and this was a nice suprise.
We ate a hearty breakfast in the sun, watching the world go by, before having a look around the ferry itself, which proved to be rather boring.
Due to the lack of trade restrictions in the EU, there is no such thing as Duty Free, so shopping is a waste of time too.
This left writing emails and sleep. I chose the former, Liz the latter. There was a place to plug the laptop in, so for the trip I caught up with some emails which have been waiting for replies since March (sorry Kim!).
The sailing was almost dead flat, far less rough than the Ireland trips were, to the point that most of the time you wouldn't have even known that we were moving. Move we certainly did, however, and six hours later we saw "proper joined on Europe" once again, sailing into the port of Hoek van Holland (Hook of Holland).
The call came to return to the vehicles, which meant wandering back down into the rather spacious bowels of the ship, where upon returing to Rosie a kind soul pointed out that we had a flat tire! Uh oh, not good news.
A quick consultation with the staff later, we got out the gear to organise a tyre change. The jack on this is unlike any we had ever seen, but we soon had it sorted out. Next task was to get the wheel nuts off. Much harder. The problem was that the spanner device we were using is one size too big, and also the nuts were of course put on with a pneumatic tool which is far stronger than I. We got three of the five off by standing and jumping on the tool, but the other two kept slipping (since the thingy was too big).
No problem, as by now we were the only vehicle left on the boat, so we were attracting plenty of attention from the staff. Their replies to our worried querying of "when does the ship sail again???" were along the lines of "no worries, we'll sort it out". A few minutes later, someone appeared with a socket set with the correct size bit, and before we could blink, a new tyre was on and we were quite literally ready to roll.
Since this was the first time we had used that tyre, we were cautious, especially with all the bumpy driving off the ferry, but no problems with it so far.
Our next problem was where to go. We needed to get to a service station to put air in the "new" tyre, so we headed off randomly looking for one, once again on the right-hand side of the road. It actually feels correct again, even though we keep looking the wrong way at intersections. The simple rule is "follow everyone else", which has worked just fine thus far.
We eventually found a service station, where we filled up the tyre and were free to wander. It's strange driving here, because we have Dutch plates, so people actually don't look twice at you. Not used to that at all.
So, where to go? That question was answered by the road we ended up on, which showed that the closest big town was Den Haag (The Hague). So, that's where we aimed. There was also a campsite listed there, so all the better. The sign posts here are eons better than in England (don't even get me started on Ireland), so finding the place was a doddle, even through the rather complex intersections that seem to dominate the landscape.
The place in question was Kijkduinpark, best described as a holiday town. It has a swimming pool, bar, kiddy play centre, supermarket and pretty much everything you would ever want should your idea of a holiday be "go somewhere and do as little as possible". As such, the price tag matches well. Not having any other information and not wanting to drive much further (our body clocks were further thrown out by loosing an hour). Half an hour's check-in process later, we were ready to roll.
The place was absolutely packed, so finding our spot was a little challenging. This first problem solved, we were ready for the pool. If we are going to pay for this stuff, we are sure going to use it. The pool turned out to be very difficult to get in to (they're good at this here), meaning that we actually had to walk through what looked like toilet cubicles and out the other side to gain access. We were quite confused for a while, but just tried to look like we knew what we were doing. The swim was nice, but too warm, and there were too many kids, so we were soon back at Rosie, doing some journal updates, getting changed, then back to try the strange Dutch beers in the sunshine.
This was enough for the day, bed called out loudly.

(customised)