A Weekend in Drenthe and Friesland
It seems like we just got back from Sweden, heck, I still haven’t even fully processed my Sweden photos yet. But when you finish a busy 10-day push to get a brief out and you have a free Friday, on Father’s Day weekend to boot, you take advantage of it. Sure, we got a bit of a late start on Friday, and the trip was really only half-planned (by our normal standards), but we wanted to get away so we picked a region and headed out.
We’d talked for awhile about heading up north, but every time we researched places that might be interesting to photograph our search ended with us feeling a bit underwhelmed. Nevertheless, we figured that should be the next area to checkout, so I did some quick planning and we decided that this was to be a scouting trip and kept our photographic expectations low. That was a good thing because, for a number of reasons, this was not a photographic bonanza for us. Not that we didn’t enjoy ourselves, or even take pictures, but there were few real photo opportunities. But there are always images to be had, and we made them when we could.
We spent the first night at a state campground adjacent to the National Park Drents-Friese Wold in the center-north part of the country, and the second night not far from the National Park Lauwersmeer, a giant estuary area on the north coast. We had a couple of nice hikes in those parks, but we didn’t discover any hidden photographic gems. Plus, we didn’t have very cooperative weather. In fact, the weather didn’t cooperate the whole weekend. We’d just had two very fine weeks with nice days and late-afternoon showers; the weekend turned out to be very different. So it was more hikes than photography during our stops at the parks and we wound up exploring the greater area mostly by vehicle, stopping to get out and walk around whenever we came across a location and it wasn’t raining.
One of the real lessons from our trip was gaining a deeper understanding of what the lowlands really mean. We had our exposure during Christmas with the flooding of the Rhein River near us, but up north, there are reminders that much of the land is at or below sea level. Just north the Netherlands is the Wadden Sea, with a string of barrier islands, the West Frisian Islands (visible in the distance below). The shore here is flat and has a vast tidal zone that gets exposed at low tide.
What keeps the ocean at bay are Holland’s (the Netherlands’) famous dikes. Or more appropriately, a very long, very tall dike that runs along the entire coast line. And wherever there is a river, or a bay, the dike continues. It may look like a long bridge when you bring it up on your monitor, but zoom in and you’ll see it’s a dike You can see the dike on the map below, and the control point, that closes at higher tides, and opens when the sea is lower.
The image below is taken from the top of the dike at the Bantswei, Waddenzee spot on the map above, you can see the dike mechanisms off to the left in the photograph. And yes, that’s our bimobil (still not named) in the parking lot.
Farther down the coast, at a small town where we decided to take a coffee break, you can see just how imposing the dike is. Again - this thing runs the length of the entire coastline.
This is the view from the top of the stairs in the image above. Also, the dike is hardened about half way up its height on the ocean side, well above where flooding would occur to the houses on theft.
Dikes aren’t the only thing we learned about on our trip. Canals run throughout the northern part of the country. Several main canals arc from east to west, connecting a series of lakes and bays, with a series of smaller canals that run north-south connecting the main canals. Several of the back roads we drove ran along the smaller canals, where we would see small canal boats and the occasional small barge chugging along. As for the major canals, well, the highways didn’t always go over them, in fact, more often than not you wound up going under the canals. Imagine my shock at seeing a sailboat crossing above the highway as we approached. No, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Or as had happened earlier, a major barge with a dozen semi trailers stacked on it cruising along as we passed under it!
Much like our Sweden trip, I scanned Google maps for potential spots of interest to visit. I came across one of them as I was looking at the dike that separates the Waddenzee from the IJsselmeer. Again, that is a dike, not a bridge. One of the guys at our Iveco dealership (where we get the maintenance and annual inspection done for the bimobil) recommended we drive across the dikes, so I planned a route home that took us there. The dike controls and shipping locks are at the eastern end of the dike.
And yes, there is a second dike (Enkhuizen to Lelystad) between the Markermeer and the IJsselmeer.
We wound up driving past the lock area, and turned around at an island at the mid-point of the dike and drove back just to check it out. It was low tide as we drove by so the dike was open and we could see the IJsselmeer rushing into the ocean much like a river under a bridge.
Farther down the dike in the bay (where we turned around) was a wind farm and, you can see, the weather that greeted us all weekend. We also saw plenty of kite and wind surfers because there was plenty of wind to be found there.
Our intended destination was the facility at Kornwerderzand, namely the Kazemattenmuseum. When the proposals were first raised for building the dike, the military insisted on building a fortification to protect the dike controls given its importance to the nation’s security. As the museum explains, this was the only fortification that resisted the Blitzkrieg in 1940 (eventually surrendering when the country officially surrendered).
After WWII the fortifications were in use until 1964, then eventually becoming overgrown with scrub brush before restoration efforts began not too long ago. The fortifications are impressive, with explanatory boards throughout the various bunkers.
You get a real feel for how these guys had to live and, for that short period, fight. And fight they did with 225 Dutch soldiers holding off a force of almost 17,000 Germans. From the exhibits and the structures, you can see how they were able to do it.
The facilities there were very spartan, but had everything you need . . . if you didn’t mind bathing in public.
The defensive installations were impressive, from shooting ports in death holes - enclosed rooms where, if troops broke in they were trapped and could be fired upon, to . . .
. . . the bigger gun emplacements that . . .
. . . were ready to fire upon any boat attempting to enter the lock, or tank trying to cross the bridge into the base.
One diagram showed the field of fire from all of the various gun and machine gun emplacements, with the most critical areas covered by overlapping weapons. It truly makes one wonder why humans do this to each other.
Everything I read about the place said to plan to spend more time there than you expect . . . and even after spending a couple of hours there we wound up leaving earlier than we could have. We didn’t see everything, but wanted to time the walk back to the vehicle a bit better than we did walking to the museum (i.e. not get drenched), so we left when we saw some heavy rain off in the distance.
On the way, we got stopped at the dike as the draw bridge (actually, a rotating bridge) stopped vehicle and pedestrian traffic to let several boats through, to include a nice sailboat.
On the way back to the vehicle, I had to pull out the camera one final time to make a lovely image of the clouds above. And yes, it started raining minutes after we got to the bimobil and poured cats and dogs for much of the way home.