The Sketch
My first full day in Assen, and so time to go out for a bit of a wander around. I opted to drive over to Baggelhuizen, or more particularly the Baggelhuizer Plas. It’s a presumably artificial lake to the west of the town centre that’s surrounded by a geoart of lab caches and a collection of traditionals. It looked like a good place to get my caching going.
Setting Off
Breakfast at the hotel was a bit average. I suppose it was good if you’re used to European hotel breakfasts, but it’s a bit lacking if you’re used to English ones. The bacon wasn’t very bacony and the sausages weren’t very sausagey. It was served in an absolutely massive self-service canteen that was quite full when I arrived. It was quite full of noisy children and people for whom “waiting your turn” was apparently a new and unwelcome concept. So getting something to eat was an argy-bargy and less than satisfying affair. I didn’t linger.
Baggelhuizer Plas was about, oooh, let’s say 5 minutes from the hotel. It has a loop road running round one side into the “main” large car parks, but I parked at an “in-betweeny” car park about halfway round on the eastern edge. While I was parking up I made my first positive sighting of some other geocachers. You get an eye for spotting them after a while.
Walking the Walk
Baggelhuizer Plas is laid out specifically for leisure activities. That’s the main thing that convinces me it’s an artificial lake. All the shores are grassed and there’s a good compacted-gravel path all the way around the outside. Where there are woods they are generally a little uphill. Access into the woods was mainly by mountain bike trails, which tend to be up-and-down and round-about. They’re big enough to fit a pedestrian though.
There was a geoart of adventure labs (forming the shape of a crown) around the perimeter of the lake, and a smattering of 24 traditionals (and a few others) spread across the whole site. The trads were themed on Christmas, but you wouldn’t have known that just from finding the caches. My walk took me all the way around the lake and most of the woods, including up the very northern edge, where there was a trad that was up a tree. I didn’t get that one as I didn’t have the correct tools. Also in the middle of the woods was another tree-based traditional. When I got to GZ I couldn’t even see that one, so it must have been some distance upwards.
Drive-Bys
At the end of the walk around the lake I set off in the direction of two of the bonus caches for the carpool lab series. There’s about 20 bonus caches, and they are spread across this side of town. Anyway, the first was a miss, and I spent ages there. A couple of others joined and also failed. One of the guys at the first gave me a heads-up for the second, but I couldn’t find that either.
So after a couple of failures I decided to go for a bit of car-based action. There was another couple of sets of labs that took me down a country road that was wall-to-wall campsites. Assen has way too many of these. In part that’s due to the famous Assen TT races. Most people attending that are camping types rather than hotel users.
So lots of camping grounds that have very limited facilities, shall we say. I am guessing most visitors to the TT come in an RV of some kind. Anyway, the caching here was somewhat easier. I finished my session here by parking on the south-west corner of the lake and walking back to do a loop of another 6-7 lab cache bonuses that were spread around the edge of a couple of fields. Everything I did here was accessible from a bike track, by the way. That was a bit of a theme for this trip.
Back Home
Around 4pm I decided I’d had enough out here, so I made the short drive back to the hotel to get cleaned up and sorted out for the evening activities. Primarily that included a welcome event in one of the function rooms at the hotel. I bumped into a few of the people who been with me at the “failed” searches earlier. After an hour of that though I’d done my bit, so I went over to the carpool to attack a first mass of those, and then returned to the “posh” restaurant in the hotel for dinner.
