Sunday 18 February 2007

Come to Noordwijk...

...or alternatively... don't! Phil took Thursday and Friday off work and we had been planning a trip to Noordwijk at some point. Some point became today. Noordwijk is a lovely little seaside town about half an hour from Nieuw-Vennep. It is very popular with the German tourists and hosts my favourite chocolate shop and Phil's favourite ice-cream shop. We haunted the pancake house in the last few weeks of my pregnancy (very hard to fight a craving for poffertjes under normal circumstances but impossible to resist a pregnancy craving).





Anyway... back to my story. The temperature at Noordwijk was 7°C and the sky was bullet-grey. We therefore assumed the beach wouldn't be too crowded. Wrong!!! The world and his wife, children and dog were out in force. We couldn't find a parking spot anywhere. We got jammed in a car park, looking for a spot, where half the people were camping on a spot and the other half were driving the wrong way. Phil is too polite in these situations so I did the swearing and gesturing on his behalf.






We had to admit defeat and decided to go up to a more remote beach to the north of Noordwijk. We had success parking this time but the place was a total dump! There were steaming piles of dog poop and horse manure everywhere and to top it all off the tide was in so we couldn't walk on the beach (the rough sand was too tricky to push the Quinny very far). We showed Michael the sea and pointed out that England was across the water. He was completely... underwhelmed... and we gave the whole thing up as a bad job and came home to eat cheese on toast.





We shall never speak of this day again...

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