Episode 3 — Supermarkets, Sand Dunes and a Day in Amsterdam
Two things I did not expect to have strong opinions about before this holiday.
One: Dutch butter.
And two: that the most dangerous thing in Amsterdam, by a distance, is the bicycles.
Intro
Welcome back. This is part three of our week at Duinrell.
This one covers Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday is when we settled into a routine — the supermarket, the bikes, Jumbo in Wassenaar. And Wednesday we went into Amsterdam for the day, on public transport, with three kids.
I’ll say up front — the second half of this episode gets more serious, because we went to the Anne Frank House. So just so you know that’s coming.
Tuesday — settling in
By Tuesday we had a morning routine.
Me and one of the kids would head down to the Duinrell supermarket for breakfast and whatever else we needed. Cycling through the campsite on the roads, around the site, and approaching the supermarket from the left-hand side.
The supermarket’s very good. Loads of fresh bread and pastries. Our standard run was croissants, pain au chocolat, bread, ham, cheese, milk if we needed it.
A word about milk and butter
Pay attention when you’re buying milk and butter, because if you’re not used to the packaging it’s not necessarily obvious which is which.
Full fat milk is what you’d think of as normal milk. And for butter — you want the salted stuff, not the spreadable-from-the-fridge stuff. Think Kerrygold. The unsalted… no. Not for me.
Jumbo in Wassenaar
Tuesday we also went into Wassenaar to Jumbo.
It’s about five minutes on the bike from Duinrell and we got everything we needed there.
We weren’t looking for anything particularly Irish, mind. We’d brought our own teabags — obviously — so we weren’t hunting the shelves for home comforts.
And that became the pattern for the week: fresh breakfast bits from the Duinrell supermarket, bigger shop at Jumbo. We only needed to go back to Jumbo once more the whole week.
The sand dune
The rest of Tuesday we just spent enjoying Duinrell.
And the big hit — the big hit — was the enormous sand dune hill towards the back of the park. The kids ran up it and came flying back down, over and over.
It’s the simplest thing in the world and they absolutely loved it.
I joined in. And I can confirm that running up a massive sand dune is significantly harder than it looks from the bottom.
Dinner at Pops
We’d planned to eat at Toro that evening. When we got there we were told they didn’t have what we were after — pizzas or steaks, I think — so we went across the road to Pops instead. Best accident of the week.
Pops is basically an American-style diner and it was fantastic for the kids. There’s a play area inside — I’d say aimed at up to seven or eight — but our youngest still had great gas in it.
They also had free toys for the smaller kids to pick from, and what struck me was that they weren’t rubbish. There was actually a decent little selection.
Really good family restaurant. We came back.
Wednesday — Amsterdam
Wednesday was our Amsterdam day, and we did it on public transport rather than driving.
There’s a bus stop near Duinrell reception. We took the number 44 to Den Haag Centraal — The Hague Central Station — and then the train from there to Amsterdam.
It was fairly dear for five of us — and one thing I’d suggest looking at is going via Leiden instead. You can get a bus towards Leiden and then the train from Leiden to Amsterdam. It’s closer, and depending on the times it might work out better.
For us, when we checked the schedules on the day, the 44 to Den Haag was simply the easiest, so that’s what we did.
NEMO Science Museum
We got in, grabbed a sandwich, and headed for NEMO.
NEMO was absolutely fantastic. Five or six floors, something for everyone, incredibly hands-on. We could easily have spent the whole day in there.
The only reason we didn’t is that we had somewhere else to be that evening.
Or at least — we thought we did.
Walking across Amsterdam
We decided to walk from NEMO towards the Anne Frank House. About forty-five minutes.
Now, one thing I had been conscious of beforehand was the Red Light District. It’s the thing everybody mentions about Amsterdam, and travelling with kids I genuinely wasn’t sure what we’d walk into.
In reality? We saw essentially nothing. We passed two windows with chairs in them and nobody sitting in them. We were conscious of where we were walking and we kept moving.
At no point did we feel unsafe. Not once.
The actual danger in Amsterdam is bicycles
I’m only half joking.
There are bikes everywhere, and they come from directions you don’t instinctively check when you’re crossing a road.
The lesson I’d give anyone travelling with children: treat the cycle lane like it’s another road. Look properly before you step across it. And do not assume that because you can’t hear a car, nothing is coming. Because the bike makes no noise at all and it is doing a fair speed.
The Anne Frank House — on the wrong day
So we get to the Anne Frank House.
And we discover that we’ve booked it for Thursday.
It is Wednesday.
Entirely our own fault. Entirely our own confusion. But the staff there were extremely understanding — we explained what had happened, and despite our tickets being for the following day, they let us in.
Now. I’m not going to try and cover the Anne Frank House in detail, because I don’t think I could do it justice.
I found it very emotional and quite shocking in places. It’s somewhere I think everybody should go if they get the chance.
You know the story. Everybody knows the story. But walking through the actual rooms, through the annex, is a completely different thing. You’re standing in the place where Anne Frank — a teenage girl — and the others hid for more than two years before they were found. And where she was taken from, before she died in a concentration camp.
Seeing the actual diary, under glass, was probably the thing that brought it home to me the most. Because it stops being a story in a history book. The diary is right there. The rooms are right there. And you are standing in the place where it happened.
Very sad. Very poignant. And genuinely humbling.
Getting home
By the time we came out, the kids were flagging.
We walked back to Amsterdam Centraal and got the train to Den Haag. Not quite the last train of the night, but you could feel we were near the end of the services.
And then — this is very Dutch — we arrive into Den Haag Centraal at basically the same minute the number 44 bus was due to depart. We got off the train, up the stairs, and with absolutely textbook Dutch efficiency, the bus was gone.
No hanging around waiting for the tourists. Off it went.
Next one was about half an hour later, so no disaster. We waited, and eventually got back to Duinrell.
Long day, especially for the kids. But between NEMO, the walk across the city and the Anne Frank House — one of the most memorable days of the whole trip.
Long day. Especially for the kids. But between NEMO, walking across the city and the Anne Frank House, it was one of the most memorable days of the whole trip.
Next time: three gears, a lot of hills, and about twenty-five kilometres of cycling to get to a Lego shop.