I recently came to the conclusion that I should continue my travel blog.
Just because I finished my big journey to Asia, Australia and New Zealand doesn’t mean that my travel works are finished.
I love writing and I love traveling – and I have always written about every trip in a diary, so why not do it on my blog?
Here is the next chapter: a lovely weekend in Zeeland, in the utmost South of the Netherlands.
Our actual plan was to go on a weekend trip with two couples, Tina, Matthes, René and me.
We had pre-booked a small and nicely furnished apartment in Westkapelle, which lies on the North Sea coast. We were expecting a weekend full of sunshine and ‚gezelligheid’.
Unfortunately Matthes and Tina couldn’t come in the end and so we were two in an apartment for four and with practically no special planning for the weekend. I could imagine worse.
We arrived at Vlissingen after about 4.5 hours driving from Münster to collect the apartment keys from the lovely owners and then settled ourselves on the Vissershaven there, where there were several cafés with different styles of food. We chose a place with very juicy burgers and classic Dutch bitterballens.
After watching the harbour turn dark we settled for Westkapelle in another 20 min drive and found our apartment waiting for us.
The next morning we went for a little shopping in the local supermarket and made ourselves some breakfast with hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) and duo nutella on our bread rolls…yummy!
There were a lot of Germans about in Zeeland, but as I can speak Dutch fluently not so many people noticed that we were too, most of the time anyway. ☺
At around noon we rented bikes and started a trip from Westkapelle, along the coast line, most of the time cycling on the dikes to Domburg and then further to Oostkapelle, all together about 14 km. There were a lot of tourists around and we were happy not to have to find a parking space anywhere. Of course we did stop at the lovely sandy beach on our way back near the Domburg castle (which hosts a youth hostel). We spent some lazy hours on our blanket, reading and dipping our feet into the water.
The way back was quite exhausting but I was surprised to find my knee, which did not like cycling so much in the lasts weeks to hold on throughout the whole trip. The thing that hurt bad was actually both of our backsides!
On this day we did see three very special things: a deer next to our bike lane, calmly grazing away and looking at us with big watchful eyes. We also saw thousands of dancing midges. They were waving around in small black clouds like fish swarms and we could see them for hundreds of meters next to our way. Awesome and beautiful in movement.
Finally we rode our bikes on the dike and could watch the sun set from the whole way to Westkapelle...
The next morning, after packing our bags and returning the bikes, we were headed for Oostkapelle and Vrouwenpolder. I did make a mistake there. I mixed up the very beautiful village of Veere with the also beautiful but very very tiny Vrouwenpolder where there was not much to see except a church and 2 cafés. So we continued quickly to the beach nearby where we had to walk a long way across the enormous beach (0.5 km wide).
It was fantastic! Kids playing, kites flying, lots of light yellow sand, shallow sea waves washing onto the shore…and a sunburn that left us a little pink for a couple of days...
