In between all of the hustle and bustle of the big days on our trip, we had a couple of days where we just chilled and enjoyed less well-known places near where we were staying. I’ve mentioned a few times already that we rented a cabin in a holiday park in a small town about an hour south of Amsterdam. It was amazingly inexpensive (around €400 for the week I think?) and meant we were well situated to take a lot of day trips from that home base.
I apparently never took a picture of our actual cabin, but here is the reception building when you first pull into the park.
Our cabin had a lovely front porch with furniture, then you walk right into the kitchen/living/dining area. When we travel for more than a couple of days we always like having a kitchen as it means we can make some meals on our own and save money versus eating out the whole time. Plus it’s fun to go to foreign grocery stores and try new things! Here is a photo of Steve cooking in the kitchen.
At the back of the cabin was a bathroom, a bedroom with a Queen sized bed and a smaller bedroom with a child’s size bed. There was also a loft area with another adult sized bed - Steve got that all to himself.
The holiday park itself had a lot of interesting activities, although many of them were geared towards children, and it had a pool but the pool wasn’t opening until literally the day after we left! Joel tried to talk them into opening early, but no luck. We did get to enjoy the mini golf course on the property…although I use the term “enjoy” loosely. It was probably the worst mini golf course I’ve ever played - it was all made out of metal and not kept in very good condition. That said, to me, mini golf is like pizza - even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good!
Speaking of pizza…there is also a restaurant on the property! We always want to try local food when we go somewhere new, so we asked the people behind the counter what we should get. We ended up with this pizza, which was bacon and mushroom and some kind of white sauce.
We also got this open-faced sandwich which sounded fancier when the guy was describing it to us. It was basically just white bread with him and gouda, topped with two fried eggs, and a side of coleslaw. It was a little bit awkward to eat with the runny eggs, and definitely something I could/would make at home, but tasty enough.
The people who worked there seemed pretty interested in why we were there - apparently, it’s not a place that gets a lot of foreign tourists or people without kids. So in that way, it was a fairly authentic Dutch family holiday! They were so nice to us they even brought out free appetizers before our meal.
We also explored the grounds of the holiday park and found a really cool lake area with some fun things to do. One was this pulley system raft that we had fun playing on - we tried to beat each other’s time in getting across to the other side. Fun fact - you can see Steve is barefoot in this picture which turned out to be really smart because when I stepped on with my shoes they got fully soaked!
We also found this interesting rope bridge that lets you cross over to a little mini island in the middle of the lake. You can tell it is definitely a place meant for entertaining children - but that also means it was perfect for the young at heart!
So Saturday we spent hanging out around the holiday park and then Sunday we went to two major places - Gouda and Rotterdam. I will write about both of those next. On Monday we needed a chill day again so we went to a nearby town called Tiel. The town used to be famous for fruit production and jam manufacturing. They housed the famous jam factory De Betuwe until 1993. The town still pays homage to this history by having paintings and statues of “Flipje” everywhere. He is a raspberry-based comic figure who starred in De Betuwe's, jam factory advertisements since the 1930s.
We had fun spotting him all around the town.
Steve and I were craving an afternoon spent at a cafe drinking coffee, people-watching, and (for me) reading. Joel isn’t a sit-around-at-a-cafe type person so he explored the town while we did that. There weren’t as many people to watch as I would have liked but it was still enjoyable.
We ordered the most decadent caramel macchiato that also came with stroopwafel. I was delighted by this fancy spoon made to sit on the side of the glass!
We also ordered nacho cheese rolls that were super crispy and crunchy and the cheese was tasty, though not very spicy. It came with a sweet chili dip and I could have easily eaten this whole stack by myself, but I did share. We even saved some for Joel.
After enjoying our fallow time at the cafe, Joel took us on a wander around the best parts of the town. I was delighted by this house that had its own personal bridge to get there.
I thought the canals here were even prettier than the ones in Amsterdam.
These trees were pretty cool.
Even the instructions for how to use the park used Flipje! That little guy was everywhere.
When we had our fill of wandering the town we made our way back to the cabin. On the way, we had to stop for windmill pictures, of course.
Then we spent the evening in our temporary home having dinner and watching a movie on my tablet since it was about the same size as the teeny-tiny television that was provided. I enjoyed these more chill days just as much as the more jam-packed ones!
XOXO, Bethany