Home again

We’re safely back. At the moment we’re rushing round getting back to normal. The washing’s done. Most of it has even dried in yesterday’s warm sunshine. (Pity we never had that on holiday. Most of the time it was dry but my was there a bitter wind!) The Fox cooked our first meal yesterday – spicy spag bol - & I’ve prepared some potatoes for sautéing this evening to accompany a bacony vol-au-vent (pastry’s rolled). We stopped on the way home to make our visit to the golf club & have one of their excellent bacon butties for lunch. Today we’ve food shopping to do – we’ve no old potatoes in the house! – possibly the library to visit, the lawns to mow - that’s grown rapidly in our absence. It’s always the case when you go away for any length of time. There just seems so much to do when you get back. Fortunately the pile of post was small this time.

At the moment we’re really pleased to get back. We’re especially pleased to get back to the hills of England after a week of the flatness of the Netherlands. Another thing we won’t miss is the presence of mosquitoes. We’re itching all over from our bites. I’m might glad I backed that antiseptic cream.

However, even now I miss the beauty of some of the houses. Their gable ends are always so distinctive & usually very pretty. Tulips & daffs abounded. You barely passed a garden without seeing them.

Gable ends in De Rijp

The food in our hotel was very poor. I don’t think we fully enjoyed any meal. Breakfast was fine, with daily variations in the types of cold meats & cheeses on offer for the continental breakfast, even if the warm scrambled eggs for the English breakfast were like yellow rubber.

We’ve come back with the suspicion that coach holidays are not for us.  The coach itself was very good, with wonderful access & very friendly helpful drivers. Our problem was that we seemed to be forever keeping an eye on the clock to be ready to get on the coach in time. Many days we started off 8ish which meant early mornings if you wanted to get some breakfast first. We would have preferred to arrange the day to times that suited us.

Our other problem was the lack of public space to sit & read, and even if you did try to sit own, other people from the party would come to join you & talk. There was nowhere outside our bedroom just to sit & be quiet together. We like our quiet. That’s not to see we spent all our time with the others. We did escape to our own exploring of Alkmaar after watching the cheese market for a while. We also slipped off for a while in the Hague. In Amsterdam we joined the others for the boat trip but we didn’t bother with the guided tour. Instead we visited the Van Gogh Museum, which we missed in favour of the Rijksmueum & Rembrandt last time we were in Amsterdam. We did our own stroll of De Rijp, the village we were staying in, although we inevitably ended up bumping into the others. That happened also at the Keukenhof which we explored by ourselves though again kept bumping into the others.

The coach trip did have some positives. Undoubtedly we would not have seen the cheese market at Alkmaar. When we arrived the crowds were several people thick. Our tour guide duly barged a way through for us so we were able to sit at the front to see all. Equally we would have probably have looked at the hordes queueing up to go into the Keukenhof & gone on to elsewhere. We also enjoyed a very pleasant canal cruise arranged unexpectedly by our tour guide which broke up our quiet day in De Rijp & gave us quite a different view of the village as well as a good way of seeing the wildlife, the kestrels, lapwings, oystercatchers etc. etc. By ourselves the opportunity would not have arisen as the cruise was not a regular scheduled one, but put on especially for us.

The Fox realised he is not a happy passenger. He got bored looking at the very flat Dutch landscape. He would have preferred doing his own driving.  So much for the concept of making it a less tiring, & demanding, holiday for him.

It was on the whole a good holiday, if exhausting. We’ll need to rest up a bit now to recover. It’s certainly been a change. And now we can appreciate our own home all the more.

Needless to say I was soon looking at the garden. The magnolia, as predicted, has lost most of its blooms. Other things have come into flower. The wall behind the garage is looking particularly good. The wildlife garden under the silver birches is full of white narcissi with no sign of the rape we had last year. Once the narcissi have died down, our gardener will continue the business of clearing the area. Immediately we’re thinking of just grassing it over so the narcissi can continue to grow through. The grass will probably be left to grow longer than it is in the lawned areas. We want to be rid of the bully wildlife plants, the rape, the dock etc. & have something easier to look after without fearing the rest of the garden will disappear under weeds.