There was a low tide around 0500 and some of the barge crew, guides, and a few tourers were willing to rise around 0400 to bicycle out and see the sun rise over the mud flats between the island and the mainland. Julie was one of the few – here is some of what she saw. Pre-dawn in Oudeschild harbor with the fishing fleet.
Misty fields and lots of birds.
Sunrise over the mud flats.
After breakfast we all got on the bicycles and followed the tour guides out to Orphan Wells, which is where the orphans pumped water for big trading ships leaving Amsterdam via the North Holland Canal. The channel leaving the canal was shallow, so they waited to load water and some of the crew until after getting out to deeper water.
The orphanage barn has an unusual opening near the top which is designed to let owls in so that they could come in, build a nest, and hopefully eradicate mice and rats in and around the barn. This was a very common feature for a long time in Dutch barns, but most of the owl holes have been removed or turned into little windows.
We rode a bit further to the Georgian War Cemetary. Some soldiers from Georgia (the one in the USSR) were captured by the Germans in 1940 and imprisoned on Texel. A bunch of them escaped and, with help from the occupied Dutch on the island, fought the Germans for several months on Texel. Most of them ended up buried here.
The island is mostly farms with only a few small towns.
There are dunes along the west coast, and there is a Dunes of Texel National Park, where a lot of birds can be found.
We ate lunch in at the Pangkoekehuis (pancake house) in Den Cocksdorp near the north end of the island. Julie’s pancake was like a pizza with bacon, cheese, and mushrooms. Mine was a sweeter one, with apple slices and ginger.
While we ate lunch there was a brief but energetic rainstorm, but it cleared up as we left. It seemed like we had lucked out with the timing.
To get back to the barge we headed down the east coast of the island. There were a couple of volunteers at a bird refuge, and we got to see Sandwich Terns and European oyster catchers through their spotting scope, and a couple of spoonbills as well.
As we got closer to Oudeschild, another rain and windstorm began. We donned our coats, but our shorts were quickly soaked, and well-ventilated bike helmets let a lot of rain in. We all left our sunglasses on despite the dark skies to protect our eyes from the wind-driven rain. The rain let up a bit as we finally got back to the barge, but then our crossing back to the mainland was delayed as yet another strong storm cell blew through.
Finally after about an hour the storm began to wind down and the boat ventured out. The swells were fairly large and the wind was still blowing so the crossing was rough.
We docked just inside the Afsluitdijk (Enclosure Dam), a major part of the Zuiderzee Works, which changed what had been a very large bay of the sea in the interior of The Netherlands into what is now lake IJsselmeer. (I’ve linked to a lot of Wikipedia pages, but this one about the Zuiderzee Works is really interesting if you have some reading time.) We walked out across a bridge over the lock we had just traveled through to look at the Stevin Sluizen drainage sluice gates where the flow of water out of this man-made lake is controlled.
There is a small lighthouse and an old fort to protect the dike as well. For those unafraid of heights, there is a geocache at the top of the stairs.
