Longest Day of the Year

Friday-Saturday, June 20-21, 2014

In the Buffet for breakfast

Friday morning found us (Erika and me) up shortly after the crack of dawn, very excited with anticipation, of course.  Everything should be ready for our departure, I just needed to call our friend, Bob Gauthier, to make sure he was coming to pick us up to take us to the ferry.  Nope, didn't need to do that after all, Bob called us instead.  Thanks, Bob :)

Hey, We made the ferry, we are on our way!

So we're off to the ferry, schlepping our bags,  checking them with bus company that will take us to the airport from Tsaawassen, then a nice breakfast in the Pacific Buffet
where we have a great view of the crossing, then on the bus for the ride to the airport.  All of this is fairly familiar, even though I've only done it a couple of times before, still it's pretty standard Vancouver Island exit routine.

Ok, so now we're at the airport only 3 and a half hours before our flight, so certainly nothing seems rushed. We check our bags with Air Transat which is at the far end of the international airlines area.  Once through security we are the first to flop down in the waiting area outside the gate for our flight.  A couple of hours later the flight crew and front desk start to show up and eventually we are on the plane, which turns out to be not crowded at all, since at least a third of the passengers won't get on until Calgary.  Even as we leave Calgary the flight is still not too crowded, there is a row behind us that is empty and we have the seat between us empty, so a little more comfortable than usual.

Now about that longest day thing:  I had been thinking "Hey, it's an overnight flight, maybe the darkness will make it easier to sleep on the flight.  Trouble was half way through the flight, we're over Greenland and I do a calculation that tells me it's somewhere between midnight and 1 AM local time and the sun is still streaming in the porthole window on the north facing side of the plane and suddenly it occurs to me:  "Holy cow!  It's the summer solstice and we are up over Greenland during the middle of the night.  We are NOT going to see the sun go down today!"  Well we didn't :)

We landed in Amsterdam a little ahead of schedule which turned out really well for Erika and me because it made our timing for catching the shuttle bus to the conference centre in Noordwijkerhout work out perfectly.  Customs was a complete non event, even before we got to the carousel that would have our bags, there was a series of gates and we lined up in the "everyone else" line (as in EU passports or everyone else)  and they took a quick look at our passports, stamped them and even with the line up it only took about 5 minutes.  Then after about another 5 or 10 minutes the bags started to arrive on the carousel.  So thus it was that even though our flight was scheduled to get in at 11:45 AM we still caught the noon shuttle that had been set up for conference participants and didn't have to wait for the one at 3 PM.

Now the thing about noon in Amsterdam is that it really was only 3 AM back home, so with all the excitement and how well it all went, I wasn't doing so bad at all.

Now the real part of the holiday was beginning, a bus ride, unlike a plane ride, is much more like a tour because you can really see things:

First thing I noted was that at the airport it looked like I could still be in Vancouver.  Vegetation is pretty much the same, Big screen TV towering over the bus queue, lots of big corporate ads and billboards, many of them familiar, about the only thing that looked a little different was the smaller service vans that were more of a European shape.  Then into the country, and from the pictures, you will see that things start to look different:

On the bus, nothing looks very different out there

Nice fields and crops, just like the lower mainland

Wait a minute, what's this, a boat in a canal?

Aha!  Now this is really starting to look like Holland!

And there you have it!  How iconic is this?

So the bus ride was great!  It was like being on a tour, I can always provide my own commentary, ha!  There are more pictures but I have discovered that I forgot to bring something to extract pictures from the camera with.  Electronics shops around here seem to be closed on Monday as well as Sunday, so the remaining pictures will have to be added later. (Actually, I now have the necessary hardware and so am finally posting this blog entry a few days late )

Once we had arrived at the conference center, checked in, had some lunch at the onsite bar/cafe and waited for our room to be ready, it was about 3 PM and we crashed for a while.  Then around 8 PM we thought we would like to go for a walk because it was such a beautiful day and so we asked at the desk for a map showing us how to walk to the ocean.  "But" they said, "it will take 45 minutes to walk one way"  Actually, I figured what with the way we would dilly dally along, it would probably be more like an hour each way.

But, what the heck, for us it was still the longest day of the year, after all the sun still had not gone down.  So we set off for Noordwijk aam zee, which was about 4 km away, plus the 10 minute detour we took when we turned too soon on to a dead end street. 

A field where the tulips have already been harvested.  The conference center is behind the trees to the left.  The tower is part of it.

Such a lovely walk down a quiet lane.  We see more bicycles than cars.  This is after 8 PM

Erika noticed the snails crossing the road.  This was on the section of "detour" we made down a dead end.

This house has a tile roof

this one,

A Thatched Roof

We did see some lilies still growing

I get pretty excited about these signs that show all the different bicycle routes you can take

The bench picture.

The road is over on the left, next to it is the bike path, then the pedestrian path, then the canal.
Look how long our shadows are getting.  It's going on 9 PM

Oh my! A hill!  Didn't think we would see any of these

Actually, the hills are because we are now close to the ocean and they are dunes

Look, we reached the North Sea

At the top of the walkway down to the beach

So we discover that Noordwijk has miles of broad sand beach.  We walk around looking at the beach restaurant/resort area and then kind of reluctantly head back, so as to arrive before dark.  Just a few minutes before arriving back at the hotel we see the gorgeous sunset looking back the way we came from the sea.  It is 10 PM and the longest day has finally come to an end for us.  Some 33 hours of broad daylight have finally ended the longest day of my life!   And that's a very positive thing :-)