Texel Island

May 25-28, 2007

During the Pentecost weekend, we rented a bungalow with some friends in Texel, a small island on the North Holland. It was my second longest self-driving trip after the Zeeland trip on Easter. We started on Friday after office hour, directly drove from Den Bosch after I picked up Sri at the train station. Due to peak hour plus beginning of the long weekend, the traffic was quite bad. We drove through the busy part of the country, Utrecht and Amsterdam. Luckily the traffic was better on the north side of Amsterdam. We used the highway passing Purmerend and Hoorn until we arrived at Den Helder, where we took the ferry to Texel island. The trip from Den Bosch took about 3 hours and it was around 9 in the evening when we boarded on the ferry.

The ferry was huge, at least compared with the familiar ferries serving Java-Madura or Java-Bali routes in Indonesia. The Texel ferry had two floors for cars and another floor for passengers. I think the ferry could load more than 200 cars on one trip. The crossing was pretty short, about 20 minutes. The weather that evening was good and some people attracted the seagulls by throwing bread on them.

Landed on Texel, we drove through the flat landscape of the island in the twilight sunset. Somehow it was not so easy to find the bungalow, due to incorrect ending point on our driving route direction. We got lost in the middle of nowhere on a narrow village roads. Fortunately our friends already arrived in the bungalow and we got guidance via phone call until finally we could reach it.

The bungalow was actually part of a farmhouse, converted as a guesthouse by the owner. It was located near De Waal, a very small village in the middle of the island. The house was well maintained and clean. It had a spacious living room with kitchen and three bedrooms. We got a bedroom at the attic with slanted roof. One minus point was that the toilet was combined in the bathroom, not really handy for 6 persons.

On Saturday, all of us woke up pretty late. After brunch we drove to the nearest beach from the bungalow, on the east side of the island. It was called 'surfer beach', although no one surfed and in fact it was empty. There were several Texel sheep on the grass near the beach and there were lots of shells on the sea line.

Texel sheep

Next we went to De Koog, the most touristic village in Texel. The center of the village was quite big, with several restaurants, shops, and bike rentals. It was quite crowded by tourists. We walked in the center for a while and did small shopping in the supermarket.

The next visit was Ecomare, the nature center of Texel. It was located near to De Koog, in the National Park Dunes of Texel. In Ecomare we could see many things related to the nature life of Texel and North Sea. The building had three floors. After the entrance gate we could see several small artifacts of ancient habitat in Texel, animation of evolution of Texel land and sea for the last 1500 centuries, and some models of animals that live or lived in Texel including one real-size rhinoceros from many centuries ago.
The adjacent room provides information and animations about exploitation of the North Sea.

Outside the building we found seals and birds sanctuaries. The seals were located in several pools. We arrived in time to see the feeding time. While throwing fresh herring to the seals, the caretaker told some information about the seals. Some of the seals were already quite old and some were blind. The caretaker showed that a seal was blind by attracting a fish in front of it. The seal could not see the fish, only when the fish was close enough for it to smell, then it ate the fish. One big seal growled like a dog to attract the caretaker to throw a fish to it.
The seals feeding time attracted most of the visitors to watch, as well as some seagulls that competed to get fish with the seals.

Seals feeding

After watching the feeding time, we visited the basement floor. There were several aquariums with small fishes, starfishes, and crab. There was also a hole to watch the seals in one of the pools, and an information board about different kind of seals and their location all over the world.

The upper level of the building hosted models of birds that could be found in Texel. I did not visit this floor, just saw them from the ground floor.

At the backside of the building, next to the seals sanctuary, we entered the dune. There were three different walk routes based on the total distance. Not having much spare time, we chose the shortest route, which was about 1 km walk. Along the path we could see the dune landscape with its typical bushes and few sea birds. At several spots there were some explanations about the dune, how it stores water beneath the surface and how people in the past maintained and exploited the dune.

The dune of Texel

The walking path led us back to Ecomare. We entered the building again. Me and Sri visited a storm animation corner where we could experience the storm in Texel on large projector screen and the howling wind sound. After that we back to the car, right on the closing time of Ecomare.

We spent the evening back in De Koog. We walked through the city center to the seaside. The sandy beach was quite wide and very long. It's a pity that it was quite windy and cold, so we had no real interest to spend long time on the beach.
Walking back to the center, we found Noordzee restaurant and we decided to have our dinner there.

The dinner was pretty good. The restaurant served some interesting dishes. I chose Texel lamb trio: three pieces of lamb with natural meat sauce. The lamb was quite tender and had no distinctive lamb smell. We also had salad from the buffet, french fries, and fried eggplants accompanying the main dish.

After dinner we went back to the bungalow, then we played Carcassonne board game until quite late.

Combination of staying late the previous night, strong wind, and rain forced us to wake up late again on Sunday. We stayed inside the whole morning and only went out after lunch. We visited Oudeschild, a harbour village on the east side of the island, facing the Wadden Sea. We walked along the harbour, where there were several sailing trip operators to see the seals on a shrimp-catcher ship.
Next to the harbour, there was Maritime Museum. Unfortunately it was closed during the Pentecost weekend. We entered few souvenir shops before we back to the car and drove away from Oudeschild.

We took a route following the coastline of the island heading to the northeast. We reached another village at the north side of the island, called De Cocksdorp. We stopped for a while there and walked to the seaside, but the wind was so strong we could not stand it. We drove further to the north to visit the Texel lighthouse. On the way there, we stopped by in a restaurant to drink coffee and warm chocolate milk.
The lighthouse was not open for public, so we only saw it from a distance. Next to it, there was a wide sandy beach. But again it was too windy to play on the beach.

Texel Lighthouse

We drove back to the bungalow and spent the evening inside. We cooked for dinner, and played Carcassonne and Cartagena.

The weather was not improving on Monday, which was our last day in Texel. Again we stayed until lunch in the bungalow, finishing our food stock for breakfast and lunch. After packed our stuffs and cleaned the house, we spent another time to play Cartagena for the last round.
Before leaving the island, we stopped at a farmhouse to buy asparagus.

We took slightly different route when drove home. Instead of taking the highway, we drove through regional road via Alkmaar, passing green fields and saw few tulip fields from afar. After Alkmaar we switched to the highway via Schiphol and drove further south, back to Eindhoven.

It was a nice relaxing weekend, lots of sleep. It would be perfect if the weather were a bit nicer.