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Alblasserdam, Kinderdijk & Rotterdam – The Netherlands

We were intending to stop at Alblasserdam for just one night to let us visit the famous Kinderdijk windmills, but the site is so wonderful that we stayed for two extra nights and made it our base for visiting Rotterdam by water bus rather than cycling in from a closer campsite.

The base is a motorhome Air in Alblasserdam.  It is next to the water and nestled between two huge factory buildings for the local mega-yacht company.  We think that they actually make ultra-yachts as apparently mega-yachts are not exclusive enough anymore!  Outside their factory is the Luna B. It’s about 100 meters long and we think is around €500M. We emailed the factory to see if they allow visits or run tours, but no response.  We guess that we are not the right clientele! Not even a response. Tuggers 😉

On the afternoon of the 7th, Toby’s Birthday we get the bikes out and cycle out to Kinderdijk, just about the best set of Netherlands windmills you will find!

Built in around 1740, The main interesting think about the 19 (n-n-n-n-nineteen, nineteen)  windmills, is that they were not for milling grain. Instead they powered (and some still do!) pumps for draining the polders (low-lying tract of land enclosed by dikes).  It’s a lovely afternoon and it’s really busy. We also treat ourselves to the wonderful Dutch pancakes, poffertjes.  These lovely morsels are fluffy pancakes served with icing sugar and butter.  Nom nom. Charlie already has a pan back home. We must persuade him to get it out again when we get home!

The next day, Selinas Birthday, we take the river bus downriver to Rotterdam town.  Europe’s largest port, it lies at the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. Although there are boat tours of the new port, we instead stuck to the town centre.  The architecture is amazing. Much of the town centre was razed over three days in early May 1940 when the Luftwaffe bombed it, eventually forcing the Netherlands to capitulate.  So most of the town centre is quite modern.

We went to look at the SS Rotterdam, keel laid in 1958 and the last of the great Dutch ‘ships of state’.  We also saw the cube houses, the big bridges and had (an Italian!) lunch in De Markthal which manages to marry a new market building with high class housing.

One day in Rotterdam was about a week short of what we needed, but that’s all we had, so fast river bus back down to Alblasserdam and get the mothership shipshape for the short drive to Delft.

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Burge Haamstede, The Netherlands

Our campsite for two nights was the Molecaten Park Wijde Blick in Burge Haamstede.  This is probably the best campsite that we have been to in eight months! But to be fair it’s also the most expensive.  It has every facility you can imagine, and probably some that you can’t! The area is very popular with the Dutch – there are campsites all over the island.  We opted for this one because it’s in our little motorhome book. This is relevant because there are a lot of campsites with tight turnings and small pitches and the 8M mothership (with the bikes on) may not fit in. So we like to get reviews from fellow motorhomers rather than just campers 😉

We have a wonderful couple of days cycling the area and just generally chilling out.  From here, for T birthday we are off to Winderdjick near Rotterdam to see some windmills.

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Werkeiland Neelte Jans (Deltapark), The Netherlands

The daytime parking is an island within the delta.  It’s hard to be clear exactly what this is the delta of as there are so many rivers and tributaries.  

The point is that this lets us explore up close the work that the Netherlands started in 1954 after the huge North Sea floods of 1953. The Netherlands were devastated as they are generally so low lying (20% lower than sea level and 50% less than a meter above sea level).

Huge earthworks, dams, dikes, sluices, locks and surge barriers and other engineering marvels form the Delta Project/Delta Works which were not completed until 1997.  These protect the whole country from the worst that the North sea can serve up.

Compare and contrast with the UK, where the ravages of the North Sea are all too easy to see.  The Netherlands is a testament to epic engineering projects and proof that a government can get its act together when it needs to!

There is a theme park and visitor centre (Deltapark) on the island but instead we walk along the huge earthworks and examine the storm surge barriers and the windfarm. One thing we are struck by is how quiet the wind turbines are.  There is certainly some blade noise but it’s only downwind of the turbine and is almost zero about 150 Meters away. The wind noise is much louder than any noise from the turbines!

The cost to park of 7.5€ is a sting, but it was our mistake – we parked in the theme park carpark rather than free parking on the other side of the motorway.  Cheese and Biscuits in the van, and then we continue along the coast to Burge Haamstede.

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Middelburg, The Netherlands

An easy drive up from Ghent to Middelburg including the famous (and expensive in a motorhome!) Westerscheldetunnelweg which saves us about 60 km and a trip around Antwerp.  It’s one of only two toll roads in the country.  The tunnel gets us over(under) the River Scheldt delta and the will be more river deltas over the next few days!

The campsite (Stadcamping Zeeland) is expensive at 25€ a night but is only a 15 minutes walk from the town center. Maybe this price is normal for the Netherlands, we’ll see!   The site is quite new so the hedges around the pitches have not grown much yet, but it’s already a lovely site. Super high tech with ANPR cameras raising the barrier once they recognise the number plate.

As we are so close to town, there is no need to get the bikes down on this first stopover!

A brief walk into town and we manage a picturesque town hall, a windmill and a canal, all on the first date.  This is a one night stand as we are moving further along the coast tomorrow. We hope that Middelburg is a good omen for the rest of the Netherlands!

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Why Facebook for updates, aren’t they evil?

Why on earth are you using FB – they are evil data slurping, privacy eroding, advertising behemoths driven by greed and who are just part of the military industrial complex dedicated to laying waste to the planet and turning us further into sheeple blah blah blah?

We already use facebook a lot for keeping in touch with family and friends. We made this page as a way to keep them up to date on what we were up to if they do want to know, but without the constant in-your face stream of pictures of places and descriptions of meals on our personal feeds annoying hard working people 😉  

The compromise is to use FB to post the odd photo and links to blog articles which you can find here on the wordpress site.

What you could do is turn FB notifications off and instead occasionally look at the tour map to see where we are and if we have posted anything new: – the tour map is on the front page of the blog.

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Ghent, Belgium

Our first day out in Ghent was Wednesday 1st.  It is Labour day in Belgium and a national holiday.  There were various parades, protests, political marches and live music on in the town, so we had all the action in one day!  We were treated to a live classical music concert at Sint-Jacobs. We visited the Castle Gravensteen, where we had the most entertaining audio guide ever – Informative and hilarious. Think Henning Wehn and you won’t be far wrong.  Lunch was massive bowl of Spag Carbonarra for T and traditional chicken stew for S near the castle. Lunch was accompanied by a Chimay Trappist beer – White for T and Blue for S. Selina might just be getting into hopped beers! (Thanks Jerry for the suggestion!)  The afternoon was completed with a walking tour of the town taking in some ore of the wonderful brick based architecture.

Day 2 was pretty damp.  We visited the Industriemuseum where we learned the industrial history of Ghent and specifically the textile process.  The museum has quite a few fully working machines. Earplugs are provided – although the day after labour day was quiet so the machines were not running.  The industrial revolution and the textile industry are inextricably woven together (see what we did there?) and together with the Jaquard concept of programmable cards, you can see a lot of the modern world buried in the history of cotton and textiles in general.

Also we visited the Museum Dr. Guislain at the hospital campus.  This is an eclectic mix of art and the history of treating mental illness in Ghent.  Pretty interesting stuff. We also had another wander around the town.

Celebrating a small milestone today – Sel’s bike odometer rolled over 500 miles, so she has done pretty well to have gone from not having been on a bike for 40 odd years to having ridden 800km.  Great stuff! The size of mothership means that we can’t really take here into town without a lot of planning – parking is a PITA. So the bikes have been invaluable – we can just leave MS at the campsite or aire and take the bikes into town to see what there is to see.

One bike related thing we are having trouble getting used to in Belgium is that scooters are allowed to use the cycle paths.  We’ve jumped out of our skins a few times when scooters have been coming straight at us 🙂

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Zeebrugge, Belgium

No overnight stop here, just a quick visit to an awesome attraction.  Toby put B-143, a Russian submarine on the map ages ago so even though we actually need to go inland from Bruges, we nipped to the coast for the afternoon to visit the submarine. We don’t normally post lots of photos on the blog, suffice to say that T has hundreds of photos of submarine interiors, so you have a lucky escape here!

This is a 100 meter long foxtrot class submarine.  Foxtrot subs were developed between 1954 and 1981 and were based largely on German technology which the USSR inherited after the war.  75 seaman would have served on the sub, and it is bloody cramped! They were also sold to nations such as Cuba, Libya, India and Poland.  Foxtrots even played a part in the Cuban missile crisis.

What is interesting is that the sub is almost untouched – it was decommissioned in June 1991 and not too much has been stripped out and even things like the torpedo computer is still intact.  Time has taken its toll on the sub, and although it looks shabby on the outside, it was great spending an hour or so clambering around inside, flicking switches and generally developing a great big grin. We only learned after leaving Zebrugge and checking up the Wikipedia page for the foxtrot class, that the sub is due to be scrapped in 2019 as it’s condition is degrading too much to leave it in the water.  So visit it while you can!

The same seafront museum also has a lightship, so we explored that, then back to Mothership for the trip to Ghent.

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Bruges, Belgium

A brief stop at the local supermarket and then 50km to Bruges.  We’ve done Belgium for a weekend once before and managed to go around Bruges without visiting.  We’ve put that crime against Belginity to rights now! We’ve had a wonderful three days here – thanks Amanda and Dave for the great suggestion! 

The weather has not been kind but that hasn’t stopped us getting out and seeing the town. There were two camping options we found using our motorhome specific apps.  The first was a lovely looking camp-site but a bit out of town and the other a parking only type affair very close to the town centre. The latter was much closer to town, but had terrible terrible reviews, so we went for the out of town campsite and commuting! Camping Memling is a great little site.  Only about 40 pitches, but very spacious pitches and very nice services. Very high tech – the check in machine presents a picture of the campsite and you even get to select which pitch you want. We had the last available pitch!

Sunday and we rambled around the town, had hot dogs, and chips with mayo for lunch.  We couldn’t quite manage a waffle! We bought some Belgian chocolates (obviously). We visited the Dali museum, where you can even buy signed Dali works (a little beyond our budget!)

Monday and it was a lap of the town on the bikes and then into town for a lunch at De Beurze on the corner of Markt. We had traditional beef stew and chips with a Kwak beer served in a distinctive long glass with a bulb at the bottom.  

Then the VR tour of the town – we are becoming big VR fans!  We finished the day with the beer museum, also on Markt with six beers to try after the tour!  It was quite a wobbly cycle ride back to the mothership! We’ve put a Trappist brewery on the map – hopefully we can fit it in later on the tour.

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Dunkirque, France

We arrived at the Unicorn campsite just after lunch and as the weather was due to worsen, we went for a brisk stroll along the beach.  Popped into town, visited the commonwealth war graves and back to the van for a chilli con carne van dinner. First impressions of the town – a sad reminder that the French national pass-time is to encourage dogs to shit on the pavements – it’s everywhere!  So an afternoon wandering & doing the dogshit dance.

Day 2 and we got the bikes out and had a great time cycling up to the LAAC modern art museum (https://www.dunkirk-tourism.com/What-to-see-do/Contemporary-art/LAAC-Modern-Art-Museum), the sculpture garden and after a massive burger for lunch, spent the afternoon exploring the maritime museum and the ships that they have in the harbour. The museum is mostly models but they also have a temporary exhibition space and for our visit that was dedicated to music and the sea.  

Sadly, the Dunkirk 1940 experience museum is closed until June.  Maybe on the way home! We also didn’t get to walk around the FRAC contemporary art  museum, although the big glass building is impressive from the outside!

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Gravelines, France

What was supposed to be two weeks back at home ended up being a month and we had to kick ourselves into gear to actually get back on the road.  Finally it was goodbye to Charlie and next door’s cat, SORN the car (again) and off we go to Calais. We didn’t book in advance and just turned up and rolled right on the RORO. £125 not too bad really.  

Our first stop, just 20km east along the coast from Calais was Gravelines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines).  It’s one of many walled towns along the coast dating back to the times when the Spanish controlled the area!  These days it’s famous for the epic nuclear plant that generates over 7% of Frances electricity and for two of Frances largest data centres.  

Our stopover was just €7.50 for 24 hours, although without any services!  A wonderful spot overlooking the Fleuve canal. Interesting as the whole marina dries out at low tide leaving everything sitting on mud!

We arrived late so just time to get settled in.  A quiet night and then a brief walk of the city walls in the morning and back to mothership and off along the coast!