Trip to IJmuiden
Summer is coming to an end, but today was still nice enough for a trip to the beach. Myself and Astrid left for IJmuiden about lunchtime and after a small diversion to find a second hand shop which I had been wanting to visit for a while (something of an obsession for me), we set off down the coast for some lekker uitwaaien (untranslatable, something like “getting a lovely bit of fresh air”).
On the way we passed the beach resort at Bloemendaal. It’s a sort of little Ibiza on the North Sea coast which to my eye looks a bit pathetic, with fake palm trees and huge disco balls swinging in the September winds.
Between Bloemendaal and Zandvoort we walked through the dunes of the Nationaal Park Zuid Kennemerland, a very strange landscape and not what I am used to at all in the Netherlands. The scenery consists of rolling hills (actually dunes) covered with rough grass, bushes, and even forests. Occasional rain showers and herds of grazing cows completed the picture, which it must be said could easily be somewhere in the north of Scotland. Hard to imagine that it’s less than an hour out of Amsterdam.
