day 11

Still no maps.  Hotel reception was going to phone the company for us when they had finished checkouts and so on.  I emailed them just in case reception forgot..

We do have some route notes that were sent to us before we left England, but leaving the hotel and relying on them? It was due to rain heavily from lunchtime and all afternoon. Did we really want to go out, risk getting horribly lost and absolutely drenched to boot?

No we didn't so we stayed in, so here is a brief musical interlude:



It's a recording of the bells in the church across the square from the hotel.  Currently covered in scaffoldng but still chiming a tune every 15 minutes through the day. When we first arrived we thought it was rather fun. After an hour we were saying "I hope that doesn't go on all night," fortunately it stops at ten pm. It seems to play different tunes at different times during the day.  So far we have had "Tulips from Amsterdam" and "Que Sera Sera" as well as many we couldn't name.  Anyone know the tune posted?  (Sorry about the quality of the recording, it was done with the voice memo function on an old mobile, they do sound much more musical in reality.)

Only kidding (about the staying in, not the bells sady).  The hotel lent us a map and off we went.  The countryside here is very different, more up and down.  Not hills exactly, but today we cycled along the dykes which are about 5 m above the surrounding land.  This gave us a great view of windmills, both ancient and modern, sheep and fields.  One very big view was over the North Sea as we came along the sea wall.  One interesting varient on the thatched roof theme is the part thatched part tiled where on one face of the roof the thatch is cut away into a pattern showing roof tiles.  We are assuming it is a purely decorative thing as we can't think of any useful purpose other than cost reduction.  We are assured that thatched rooves are not the cheap option.

Heading back inland took us across some dunes which were massive and fortunately had good paths on them so we didn't get too much sand in our nice new chain.  It is a bit too late in the season for fields of tulips but there was one hint of what it might have looked like.

When we got back to the hotel the maps for the rest of the week were waiting for us so we should be able to procede on our adventure with only minimal unplanned diversions.

A couple of pictures of Schagen for you:

The hotel

 A tower from an old castle with the church in the background.

and finally, the long awaited return of WOTD

A detail view this time as most of the other pictures have got large spots of water on the lens.