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Thursday, April 13, 2017
I slept in a little this morning – got up at 6 instead of 5. I got most of my repacking done, then headed downstairs for breakfast. I went back to room to finish packing and got everything downstairs in plenty of time. We loaded the vans and headed north.
On the way to Schagen, we stopped by the side of the road to shoot a windmill by a stream or canal. The photo on the left is the view from the edge of the road we were on. The photo on the right was back around a nearby corner.
Lunch was nearby – I had a yummy apple pancake for lunch. It smelled so good that they ordered another one for the table to share and taste. It quickly disappeared...
Quick side story - as we entered this restaurant, the first four or five of us were all women, looking around for restroom signs. The woman at the counter just grinned (correctly interpreting the looks) and pointed the correct direction. She was nine months pregnant and understood the looks... Interesting restrooms - there were three stalls total, all unisex. It's a sign of the future.
After lunch, we drove on to Schagen. Our hotel here is a Best Western, but the section we have rooms in is in “The Castle”. I don't know if it's an old building or specially constructed for tourists. It feels like an old building that has been completely modernized. It even has a moat! I think our group had all the occupied rooms in this building.
According to the nearby signs (discovered later and all in Dutch), we learned that the building is very old, but you'd never know it from the inside. Very nice.
The floor I was on only had rooms on one side of the hallway with large windows overlooking the courtyard on the other side of the hallway. These two photos show the wonderful view I got as I exited my room.
The photo on the left shows one of the turrets (left) on the sides of the courtyard with Grote Kerk (the church) in the background. We would go down the little alleyway to the right of the red roof to get to the hotel's main building and restaurant. The photo on the right is looking across the courtyard to the opposite turret.
While waiting for our next meeting time, I grabbed my camera and walked around our building. These three photos show three different views of our "castle" and its moat. In the center photo, you can see my room - it's the one on the second floor with the bump out window. The window sill of this window was a couple of feet deep and easy to sit in.
Grote Kerk dominates the skyline here. It's bells and carillon announce the hour and quarter hour most of the day. They do shut the sound off at night... The photo on the left is our view of the church as we walk from our castle to the main plaza of town where the rest of the hotel and its restaurant is located. The center photo is a streetlamp with the windows of the church in the background. The photo on the right shows the church steeple.
After settling in, we met up for our afternoon ice cream.
Then back to the room to pick up some camera gear and we headed out looking for good tulip fields, especially if they had a windmill nearby. We found some fantastic fields of both hyacinths and tulips, stopping at both to shoot the colors and closer shots.
The photo on the left was taken at our first location and shows rows of hyacinth fields. The other two photos were taken at our second stop. The center photo shows fields of tulips with the owner's house in the background. The photo on the right is an adjoining field with rows of hyacinths. The purple hyacinths are dotted with yellow tulips which were left over from last year's crop...
One of the owners of the fields at this second location came out to speak with us. He drove his electric car down. We wound up learning a lot about bulb farming from him. After spending some time with us, he got back in his car and silently backed back to his house!S
Sometimes, they'll remove the heads from the tulips so that the leaves can concentrate on making the bulbs as large as possible. That's what's happened to these red and white tulips. As the center photo shows, the blossoms were tossed in a ditch between rows of tulips. The other two photos show patterns in these tulip heads.
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These two photos show two more views of the red and white tulips.
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The photo on the left shows a single red tulip growing among yellow ones. More than likely, the red bulb was accidentally left in the ground from the previous year.
The photo on the right also has a single odd tulip growing among yellow ones. However, this is more likely to be a manifestation of a virus and this tulip, bulb and all, will be plucked from the field to keep it from infecting others.
Then we headed for the sunset spot the leaders had scouted for us. On the way, we found it – a windmill by a tulip field. We spend the rest of the afternoon there. Lovely!
These are three of the photos I took this afternoon.
But it was very cold and windy. We left before sunset as some of the group wanted to go back to the hotel for a little while. One woman of the group was in pain with ankle problems, so she really needed to get back. After dropping some of us at the hotel, the rest went back for sunset. Those of us not shooting the sunset were to hold the dinner table open for the rest. That plan flopped. As I found out the next morning, the restaurant wouldn't serve anything until everyone was seated...
I just wasn't hungry and couldn't eat, so I stayed in. Tomorrow starts early with a sunrise shoot.
How the heck does this shower work????? I think it's missing a piece as there is no way to secure the handset to the wall bracket. It has to be held to be used. I wonder if it's broken? Oh, well, I got a shower of sorts and hosed down a bunch of the bathroom at the same time. And yes, the bracket was broken.
After my shower, I looked out the window and the sky had started turning a little pink and pretty, so I got the camera out and sat on the window ledge to get a few photos of the clouds.