Texel, day 2

On this second day of our little Texel visit we started off at the lighthouse. The weather was nice but it was very windy and chilly.

The sun offered some nice photo-ops.

This time we went inside the lighthouse which has about 7 floors. I believe this old toilet is on the 3rd of 5th floor.

At the end of the second world war the tower was badly damaged and they built a new outer wall around it. On the 4th floor you can walk in between the old outside and the new outside wall and you can see where the shells and bullets hit.

The control room is not in very much use anymore I think...

The lighthouse has a website: www.vuurtorentexel.nl/.

The beach at the lighthouse is also very wide. You wouldn't believe howmany ships sunk in these waters.

Driving down the island I wanted to make a stop at this windmill just to take a photo. Frankly I thought it would be a bit more interesting but this is it...

Then we drove to a sheep farm. There re lot of little lambs there around this time of year.

One sheep had just delivered two babies.

This one was trying to walk for the first time.

Trying to find milk.

But because mama sheep's milk factory wasn't up to speed yet, the lambs got fed from the bottle.

This mama sheep was resting with its babies.

Every farm has chickens.

More sheep.

Outside of the farm the view was lovely.

Especially when looking towards me of course ;-)

They really love building sheds like this. I quite like them.

The farmer was putting on a demonstration of sheep-herding with his dogs; 3 Australian Kelpies.

Introducing some of his sheep.

Fun with hay.

After the sheep we drove to an old fortress without having any idea what to expect which was good coz there wasn't much to see.

But, Napoleon did come to inspect his troops here once.

Driving a bit further we spotted these fields of tulips.

We drove down and walked through all of them to make nice pictures.

There was also a little field where you could pick your own flowers for 15 cents per flower. We picked 30 very nice ones :-)

When we were about done we drove back to the ferry and just missed it which meant we had to wait for an hour. We were the first ones though, woohoo! :-)

We had dinner in Den Helder at some Italian resto. It was VERY nice but portions were HUGE. I was unable to finish this Calzone...

Driving home through shower after shower. We had a very ncie 2 days out and about. Next time a bit less wind please!

Texel, day 1

So early this morning we drove to Den Helder to catch the ferry to the island of Texel. We are spending 2 days on the island. It's only a little island with not too many things to do and we haven't really thought of things beforehand so we'll see how it goes :-)

The ferry takes surprisingly little time. You get to the island in about 15 minutes. Just enough time to leave the car, get a cup of coffee, enjoy the view for 5 minutes and get back to the car. Oh, and I even went to the toilet!

Ferry-view.

Our first stop was at Ecomare, a natural history museum, seal and seabird sanctuary and a small sea aquarium. We were just in time for the feeding and training of two porpoises (Dutch: Bruinvis).

It was really nice to sea these creatures.

There were seals as well.

In the bird sanctuary there were quite a few Gannets (Dutch: Jan van Gent). Beautiful birds.

Feeding time for the seals. They have different kinds of seals there spanning all ages.

Seal.

After our visit to Ecomare we went to our hotel "Tatenhove" to see if we could have an early check-in since it was only just afternoon. Thankfully our rooms were ready.

The hotel was lovely and recommendable!

After a coffee and room-check we drove up North to check out the light house. It was getting late and it was cold and rainy so Milan and I just walked up to have a look.

It's a pretty decent lighthouse!

The light was lit for the first time on November 1st, 1864.

We drove to a beach restaurant called "Paal 17". Inside it was very nice and warm and cosy. We had a beach view which was lovely.

The food was great and so was their homemade beer!