Saturday 25nd June Purmerend to Bleiswijk
Where’s Bleiswijk you may ask and what’s there?
Who knows but the free motor home site is right next to the local fire station; here’s hoping there isn’t a call out in the night. The site is also a bell-ring away from the local church which obviously needed to warn locals that tourists from NZ were in town, or they may have been commemorating Veterans Day as the bell tolled for 8 minutes at 6.44pm on the 25th June. Europe not only takes their war history very seriously but their church life and bell ringing also plays a big part, especially on Sunday. We were blessed the next morning with the bells calling the locals to prayer for an extremely long time.
Today we went to Alkmaar which apparently has a cheese market on Friday mornings, however for us it is Saturday, so we decided to chance it and see if they held a Saturday market. Sure enough there was cheese, produce, salami, fish, olives and craft stalls. Edam cheese was not the local fare so it was kept hidden out the back; we were therefore coaxed into buying the local Verwen at more than NZ prices, when just down the road you could buy Gouda at ridiculously low prices. The Dutch eat on average 17kg of cheese a year and the majority of that is Gouda, so guess where we are going tomorrow.
The market also sold bakery goods so lunch today consisted of custard filled croissants and cheap fresh cherries at three euro per kg. The next stop was to be Zaanse Schans to see windmills, a clog factory and more cheese but the GPS couldn’t find such a place so we carried on to Beverwijk.
Beverwijk has a massive Bazaar that is well signposted from anywhere in town and has plenty of parking. There are lots of stalls selling anything and everything but mainly cellphone products, rip off clothing at exuberant prices and Greek looking food. We acquired the services of one of the dodgy cellphone dealers to disassemble an iphone to get a broken SIM card out of it. For the first time this trip we filled up with diesel which was roughly €1.10 per litre, this was one of the better prices we saw in Holland. The tank we started with lasted us a while but at the rate the GPS is playing up in Holland this tank may not last long.
Our next planned stop was Ijmuiden to see very large ships and barges going through locks on the canal, but the tunnel was closed, we didn’t wish to take the ferry and the numerous other roads the GPS wanted us to go down were closed. Unable to comprehend this the GPS was silenced, sworn at and then overridden to take us to the very large bulb gardens at Keukenhof, Lisse. However the bulb season finished in May so the gardens were shut, thank god I could hear Roger muttering because they had an entry fee of €15 per person plus €6 for parking. I had to settle for seeing paddocks of the remains of tulips and growers lifting the bulbs.
Next city on the list was Leiden, via Haarlem airport. I’m not sure what Leiden has going for it but it appears to have lots of foreign university students and professors. It also has a nice clean Laundromat with plenty of functional efficient machines. For a reasonable price the laundry was done and the fridge was stocked with red meat and greens for tea tonight, from a nice Dutch supermarket called Dirk; well recommended over the Lidl or Aldi.
The Hague or Den Haag, home to World Forums and embassies and other important events was next on the list, but seem to be on people overload mode today. It is Veteran’s Day and their giant square is absolutely buzzing with armed forces, returned soldiers by the bus load, public spectators, scouts, tents and stalls. We progressed onto Delft where I was going to buy the obligatory delft product for the salt and pepper shaker collection; however I had already purchased a blue and white set from the Alkmaar Market.
We settled on a free car park in Bleiswijk for our overnight spot as it was close to the all-important Gouda and the GPS was wearing the poor driver’s patience out. I proceeded to cook our tea with the mince we bought from Leiden, however we had no idea what Biologisch Rundergehakt is but it made damn nice Nasi Goreng, which everybody knows is a Dutch/Indonesia rice dish but in our case we had lettuce cups filled with curried mince.
Our neighbour for the night has just arrived and is playing a piano accordion. Unfortunately for her both markets we went to had these big noisy piano accordion sounding machines (wurleitzer?) which drove us crazy. The operator stood by it shaking a donation tin, which we can only assume was a demand for money in order to silence the racket.
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