After leaving our stuff in the castle barn (it has everything), we went to look for our rental bikes. They were not there, so we got the sweet hostel guy to come and help us. Only one of them turned up, the one with handlebreaks that I insisted on using, so my mom got a show-off red and black teenage boy's bike. The seat had two seams in it and it had rained the night before, so she rode with a wet spot on her butt the whole time.
We left our castle and rode to Domburg to check the bus schedule, then backtracked and went eastward through the woods near Oostkapelle, over the fake island off Vrouwenpolder, up over the locks of the Delta Project. The locks are massive blocks of concrete and steel that look scary and very manmade. Then we visited a cool museum about the Dutch land reclamation project, aka dikes and dams. It was very cool. A lot of land here used to be under water, or used to be beach, or used to be ocean, or used to be unuseable at high tide, but the Delta Project spent millions of dollars and took over twenty years to dam rivers, build up riverbanks, create moveable dikes, assemble locks, and otherwise change the face of their coastline.
We ate french fries at the museum that we had to pay for. We were both convinced that our entry ticket guarenteed us a free snack at the restaurant. It didn't.
On our way home, we pass through Veere, an old fishing village which is now a yuppy yacht harbor, as well as the home of our castle hostel guy. There are a lot of buildings from the 1500s and an old well. We pass through Gapinge, Serooskerke, and Oostkapelle on our way home. We see many windmills (I'll give a count later), lambs (of the shorn and unshorn varieties), cows (all smelly), ponies (ditto), ducks, and clogs on windows. We are besieged by tiny little bugs that stick to our glasses and shirts as we ride into the wind. My mom says they stick around farmland because they like fertilizer. We shake out our shirts several times but the poop bugs follow us all the way back to the castle.
At the castle, we are FAMISHED, and the sweet hostel guy makes us cheese sandwiches. These are so not as good as the kind I ate every day for dinner in Thailand, mostly because they are just plain bread and Gouda cheese, and we all know how I feel about Gouda, but for the moment, they will do. SHG also brings us two tall glasses of apple juice from a local appletree. Or a local farm. Or grocery store or something, but he makes a big deal about how the apples are local. The apple juice is delicious.
We walk two kilometers to the Domberg bus stop, and on the way, my mother reminds me again that she is very fertile. She has done this before on more than one occasion: Leaning close to me, so that we are eye to eye, she will say, "You know, I am very fertile," as if to frighten me into using twelve different kinds of contraception simultaneously every time I have sex.
At the bus stop we play Boggle, and boy am I good. I win three games in a row. Our bus comes, and the journey is uneventful other than we see a lot of windmills. At this point, we have totally lost count, so I'm just going to add up the number of windmill pictures on my map of the region and assume we saw all of them. Which is possible. They all look alike, anyways. Ok, my mom is arguing that they don't all look alike, she says that some are brick and some are wood and some are big and some are little, so ok, there are four different models and we've seen all four several times.
THE HOTEL IN MIDDLEBURG is just as amazing as the castle, even though it is a measly Best Western. Our room is HUGE, with a king sized bed and a bright red comforter. It's like the honeymoon suite. There is also:
- a TV
- an armchair and a table
- a desk
- a bathtub
- towels
- a blow dryer
- a shaving kit
- a dental set
- face towels I can steal
- snacks in the bar
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