Writing about: Family Travel, kids, places, food…

Month: August 2012

The Hague: Beaches

The beaches in the Netherlands run up the entire coastline pretty much. Similar to Belgium and Northern France, they are wide swept beaches with sand dunes and parkland. The tides are pretty big so sometimes the water is a long walk out. Still the wide beaches are nice and offer a lot of room to play on.

beach den haague 3

The dunes near our beach area in the Hague are large parkland with bike paths, walking paths and horse trails. We have foxes, rabbits and even 2 shaggy cows and their calves wandering around. That gives you quite a turn when you see these on the loose actually and we were kind of nervous to walk past them running freely (they have enormous horns).

There are restaurants on the back at almost every beach access point and these are filled with low benches and large throw pillows and tables. Very relaxing. Plus most have children’s play equipment – trampolines and slides and big piles of buckets and shovels. They know how to keep parents AND children happy!

beach den haague 2

We are living about 5 minutes to the beach, which is wonderful. We have a neat restaurant on our beach access and lots of families head there. From our access to the right we did discover allows dogs off the leash and is a nude beach! That was an interesting discovery after we first set up our blanket and got settled with book for mom and buckets for the kids. Charlotte said, “mom he has no clothes on.” Being used to naked children on European beaches I simply kept reading and muttered something about “ignore it/it’s just nature” only to put my head up a few minutes later and give quite a gasp! The group of adults near us was a bit startling to see completely naked.

We have grown used to it but as a group we all veer to the left side of our beach which is not clothing optional and doesn’t allow dog off the leash. Both seem more sensible on sand!

beach den haague

Leiden again

leiden second trip

We enjoyed Leiden so much that we took Grandma and older brother Ben back on Wednesday. Market days are Wednesday and Saturday but the weekend one is the biggest and also has an antiques market which is nice. Crowds are higher and it is fuller on Saturday but there are more stalls for sure. Just depends what you want.
We also found plenty of boat trips from small one family style to larger groups in covered boats. Most last 1 to 1.5 hours. The smaller boat drivers are open to bartering with taking children for free etc.

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