Windmills, Welly Clogs and Witches

Monday 28 March – Sunday 03 April 2022

Hurrah! Our first trip abroad in over two years!

The Drive South

We left home during an unseasonably warm spell. Having packed SOK in a balmy 16 degrees, we set off equipped for warm weather. Shorts… Sunglasses… Sun Cream… Hmmmm. Optimism in action….

Normally we’d take a few days over the journey south. With the length of this trip limited by our needing to be back home by the end of April, though, we decided to just go for it and head straight for Canterbury on Monday then down to Dover the next day.

Overnight: Canterbury (28 March)

We’ve stayed before at the fabulous New Dover Road motorhome stopover in Canterbury:

Dover

On Tuesday morning, we drove down to Dover and parked at National Trust’s White Cliffs car park until it was time to check in for our ferry. You get a great view of the port from there; DFDS ferries going in and out like buses and all of the P&O ships tied up with no signs of life. Sign of the times….

As you’ll see from the photo, the warm weather had now suddenly ended and a mist had descended over the Channel.

This being our first trip abroad since Brexit took effect, we’re new to the “no meat or dairy” rules when travelling to France. Mark decided to gorge on the last of his cheese:

The crossing was no problem at all. After disembarking, we drove the short distance to one of our favourite French aires at Bergues, just inland from Dunkirk.

Overnight: Bergues (29 March)

We’ve been here before, so I forgot to take a photo of the aire. Oh well…..

We had a wander round the town the next morning as we haven’t been there for so long. It’s great, exactly as you’d make it if you were designing a French town from scratch and building it from Lego. I particularly love the tinny little tunes you get every quarter of an hour from the bell tower!

The town hall:

Our next port of call was the nearby Leclerc supermarket so that we could fill SOK’s rather empty fridge with food. Mark took quite some time gazing at the plentiful range of fromage to choose from:

In the afternoon, we headed up the coast and into Belgium.

Driving through Nieuwpoort, we happened across the King Albert 1 Memorial (Albert was the King of Belgium during WW1) and made an unplanned stop to take a look:

Right next to it is the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Nieuwpoort Memorial which commemorates 552 British soldiers killed on the Belgian coast in World War 1 who have no known grave.

Overnight: Kompas Camperpark, Westende (30 March)

We spent the night at Westende, between Nieuwpoort and Ostend. For €12.50, we got a night on a small aire next to a huge campsite run by the same outfit:

We did the ten minute walk down to the beach, realising as we went that the whole area seems to be full of camp sites and holiday apartments.

The walk on the beach was, erm, bracing. It is the North Sea, after all, not the Mediterranean.

Waking up the next morning, we discovered that we had entered an unseasonably cold spell. Brrrrrr! Having left the winter clothing at home, it was time to layer up. Three pairs of trousers were required in my case…. I only had a hood (no hat). Mark had a hat but only fingerless knitted gloves….

Atlantikwall Raversyde

The Atlantikwall Raversyde museum was only about 5km along the coast from our overnight stop at Westende.

The museum has extremely well-preserved examples of both WW1 and WW2 German gun batteries. The land it’s on was bought by King Leopold II of Belgium in early 1900s. He built himself a wooden “cabin” on it overlooking the sea.

When the Germans captured this stretch of coast during WW1, they burned down Leopold’s cabin and built the Aachen Battery on the site. A WW2 battery was built very near to it in 1941-2.

Whilst most other German gun batteries were destroyed after the wars, these were saved by the fact that they were situated on royal land, with the then owner, Prince Charles of Belgium, being opposed to their destruction.

Overall, we thought the museum was well worth a visit and fairly priced at €8 each. We didn’t learn a huge amount of facts and figures about either of the wars there; it’s more about being able to actually see what’s on the site.

Overnight: Brasschaat (31 March)

The drive from Atlantikwall Raversyde to our next overnight stop at Brasschaat, just to the North East of Antwerp, should have taken two hours but took just over three. The ring road round Antwerp was reminiscent of the M25. Oh well….

Brasschaat offers free motorhome parking next to a huge park with a castle in it (which is apparently now a posh restaurant).

After a peaceful night, we woke to… snow. The snow did very quickly melt, though it was another cold day. Mark went for a jog and then we had a wander round the park in the morning before leaving. We’d definitely come back here (Antwerp traffic willing…..).

De Biesbosch National Park

Continuing North, we stopped off at De Biesbosch National Park. This is apparently the largest freshwater tidal zone in Europe. There was a small visitor centre with information about the 1421 flood that created the current wetlands, wildlife (including beavers – not that we saw any evidence of beaver activity on the short walk we did), and so on. Mark’s favourite exhibit was the “welly clogs” (see featured image for this post).

Early April is not, perhaps, the best time of year to visit. We would like to come back sometime, though, having decided that the rental canoes would be a great way of getting around on a sunny summer’s day.

Overnight: Camperpark Kinderdijk (01, 02 April)

It’s only a short drive from De Biesbosch to the town of Alblasserdam, where we stayed at Camperpark Kinderdijk for two nights, visiting Kinderdijk itself on our full day in the area. The pricing is OK at €17 for 24 hours (so we could have just stayed one night and departed after visiting Kinderdijk if we’d wanted to), although electricity is charged separately at €2 for 3.6kW.

Kinderdijk

Kinderdijk is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a place which all tours to the Netherlands seem compelled to visit.

It’s a collection of 19 windmills (some if not all of which date back to the 18th century) that were used to pump water from the polders. All really interesting, though we didn’t pay the €18.50 each that a ticket costs (which gets you access to two museum windmills, some more modern pumping stations, and a boat tour). You can access the path through the centre of the site for free to look at the windmills, and of course there’s lots of information available online. Maybe if they’d charged a little bit less we’d have been tempted…..

It was a good walk from SOK (maybe 12km or so in total?), though we managed to make a loop of it by walking to Kinderdijk along the canals and returning through the town of Alblasserdam (which offered a handy LIDL for a few bits and bobs).

Oudewater

Leaving Camperpark Kinderdijk on Sunday morning, we drove to the small and very cute town of Oudewater:

Our reason for visiting Oudewater was to visit the Heksenwaag museum. This turned out to be absolutely tiny and, as a result, somewhat overpriced at €8 each (though it’s good fun). Housed in the town’s old weigh house, there are three short films upstairs about witches (which are very general; you won’t learn much about witch-hunts), then on the ground floor the original scale dating back to 1482.

It does seem logical that witches must be very very light, otherwise how could they fly around on broomsticks? Only very limited records have survived, but it seems that from the sixteenth century, people could come to the Oudewater weigh house, have themselves weighed, and receive a certificate that they were of “normal” weight. I guess that could be handy: if the neighbours ever started muttering about you being a witch, you could then tell them “sod off, I’ve got a certificate”.

Mark weighed in at 74kg and now has a certificate to prove it. As for me, I also have a certificate (but then my grandma did teach me a few useful spells for dealing with weighing machines….)

Overnight: Gouda (03 April)

It’s not far from Oudewater to Gouda; we arrived mid-afternoon and set off for a wander round the town centre. Below is the triangular main square with one of the oldest town halls in the Netherlands, dating back to 1450:

At the far end of the square, just peeping out from behind the town hall, is Gouda’s old weigh house which nowadays houses the tourist information centre.

Guess what we found just inside the door?

Most of the shops were closed, it being a Sunday afternoon, and the museums were on the point of closing, so we headed back to SOK, arriving just as the heavens opened. Our home for tonight is the Kleine Amerika car park right on the edge of the pedestrianised town centre.