Friesland Style

Last weekend was my work's annual weekend away.  We stayed in a seaside resort village near Anjum which is on the Northern coast of the Netherlands, right on the border of Friesland and Groningen.  It's a very sleepy area of Holland with lots of farms, wide open spaces and big houses with backyards.  It's the kind of place that people who live in Amsterdam think is terribly boring, and that the only reason to go there is to go sailing.

The resort itself was very cool.  It was not a traditional resort with a big hotel, but had streets lined with traditional Dutch houses that were set up as individual holiday apartments.  We were lucky enough to get a house to ourselves (partners were invited).

The main activities of the weekend were visiting the seal hospital and doing a cycling tour of the area. The Zeehonden creche at the nearby town of Pieterburen was a place where sick and injured seals are cared for and rehabilitated until they can be released back into the wild.  The seals wee cute and funny to watch but it was really sad ti find out about the serious damage that humans have done to the seal population by taking over and polluting their natural habitat with commercial fishing and shipping passages.

The cycling tour was like a scavenger hunt on wheels.  Our team was given a GPS unit- not one with roads and directions, but one programmed with markers that gave a compass point and a distance, and it was up to us to pick the right roads to get to the next point.  In typical Dutch style, the cycling was easy because the bikes were good quality and the roads were flat, but it was quite a hot day and we were pretty tired by the end of it.