The castle / Scheveningen pier.

This is the coach house behind which our hotel is. The hotel breakfast/dinner-room is here. Very nice building.

After a nice breakfast we went for a walk around the castle grounds.

Lots of mushrooms everywhere.

Duckies still sleeping.

The castle from another angle. Pretty nice.

A runner came by and offered to take a piccie of us. Worked out pretty well I think :-)

More mushrooms.

At 11 o'clock our host from the hotel gave us (and other guests) a tour of the castle which was really nice!

There was a bigger group than he thought but it went very well. Here we are standing in the room where we had dinner the night before.

Nice.

...

There are two sphynxes here. One of them was taken by famous Dutch writer Jan Wolkers a long time ago when the castle was abandoned. He also tried to take the other one later but had to leave it in the forrest because he had to assist his mate carry out a 3 metre tall mirror. That sphynx was never found again. The people who restored to the castle to its current glory managed to retrieve the one sphynx from his sister and had a mirrored image made so now it's in one piece again.

After the tour we drove to Scheveningen. The views were nice but the pier itself wasn't very apealing to me personally. Skip.

There's a big ferris wheel....

And you can bungy jump. Not for me.

Then we went home to get huggies from Silver :-)

The Leiden visit

Simone and I went to the city of Leiden today for a bit of sightseeing and an overnight stay at a castle in the nearby town of Oegstgeest. We parked in a parking in the centre of town where we were greeted by Herbie the Beetle.

It was about lunch time when we got there so we had a very nice lunch first.

It was busy in town because there was a Saturday market. I'm not a big fan of markets but for some reason this one was very nice. The market was mainly alongside this canal.

I like this photo because of what my camera did with the bird. I think it's an HDR side-effect.

"The influence of love".

A lady bug.

There had to be a windmill of course. It was a pretty gigantic one as well!

We passed this icecream shop and we just had to...

Naturally there are big churches.

In the old part of town there is an old fortification on top of a hill. It's not much more than a circular brick wall you can hide in and shoot at the enemy. I guess that's all that was needed in the gool ol' days.

The view frm there was good though!

The entrance.

Us.

Late afternoon we drove to our hotel. It's on this castle's grounds. The castle is called "Oud-Poelgeest". This is its wikipedia page.

We were offered a 4 course dinner in the castle for a very friendly price.

It was lovely to dine in the castle. Beautiful big room with very nice tables and soft jazz music in the background. Staff was very good and friendly and the four courses were superb. Nice!

After a lovely dinner we went to our (modern) hotel room behind the old stables. It was a lovely day spent together :-)

Gravensteen castle and more

After breakfast today, we first went back to the graffiti ally across the street. I loved the colours there!

But the real reason we went there was to locate a geo-cache that Simone found on her geo-cache app on her phone. After looking around for a while I found the cache stuck against the inside of metal bars with magnets :-)

We then walked towards the castle "Gravensteen" which we wanted to visit. Its entrance is at the square where we had dinner last night.

The castle was really fun to visit. It's not to big, lots of things and ways to photograph the castle itself or your lovely girlfriend ;-)

Great views though the entire city is crawling with cranes from all the construction that's being done everywhere...

We made it to the top!

Windows...

More windows ;-)

Me.

Simone sitting in front of the donjon.

I can really recommend a visit to the castle. It's under construction here and there but they've done most of it now. There are also some medieval attributes on display such as swords, guns and torture devices.

When we left the castle, another geo-cache was located nearby. The pointer was kind of in the middle of the square, yeah right. Thankfully a clue pointed out a tiny ally which we found. "You need a tall person to find this cache" was another hint.

The cache was hidden in a hole high in the wall inside the ally. Second cache today! :-)

The weather was OK again. Perfect for walking around and enjoying all the pretty houses and bridges.

Lovely.

Houses along one of the main canals. A big display of wealth.

We walked out of the centre a bit to find a third cache and later a fourth one.

What a pretty little face :-)

Then we walked back in town again, spotting the odd statue here and there.

Dinner in the evening wasn't great unfortunately. Service was slow and distant. When we left it was pouring down with rain so we had desert at the hotel. We were both very tired from walking all day long.

Another great day!

The Queens day bicycle ride.

Check out the hood above the door. It's windows from a boat that they have "re-used". Clever I must admit :-)

Today is Queens day. On this day, a shit load of people from outside of Amsterdam come here to party. And to vomit. And pee. And spit. And leave an amount of rubbish that takes days to be cleaned up by shifts working 24 hours a day total... I've enjoyed it many years and this year I just didn't want anything to do with it. For some reason I am totally fed-up with seeing drunk people messing up the city I live in.
So I went to Marjolein and we cycled in to the dunes.

We saw birds.

And dunes.

A small lake.

A little bird-spotting house next to the lake.

(Click to enlarge)
The best animal we saw today was a blind-worm. Absolutely beautiful animal. It's actually a kind of lizard!

(Click to enlarge)
Then we came across a castle! And because it was queens day there were hardly any other visitors. Great opportunity to see this place. It is castle Brederode.

(Click to enlarge)
Some crazy woman was waving to me while I took a picture... ;-)

View from one of the remaining rooms. It's surprising how well restored this building is. You can get a really good feel of what it must've looked like.

The last animals we saw were these Canadian Geese with 4 little ones.