Netherlands 2014

Warm and Sunny

Our first overseas trip for a number of years. We chose to go to a Center Parcs in the Netherlands in 2014, partly because it’s easy to get to, partly because they have “stuff” for kids, and partly because it wasn’t desperately expensive.

Travelling and Staying

We booked accommodation directly through Center Parcs website. Our choice was the “Port Zelande” park, which is on the coast in the middle of the Delta Works. To get there we opted to take my car. Well, it’s a pain in the twinkles to get there any other way. And as it turned out, it was a lot less driving than I thought. Should have Googled it. Anyway, travel by car through Eurotunnel, and a 3 bedroom villa/chalet/thing at Port Zelande.

Center Parcs does bookings in fixed lebgth periods – Friday to Monday and Tuesday to Thursday. There are no options. You have to book in units of those. So in true Countdown style we booked two from the top and one from the bottom, giving us 11 nights of accommodation. Around that, we wrapped one night in Bruges on the way out and one in Ghent on the way back.

The villa turned out to be a two-bedroom terrace in the middle of a block. However the rooms were well-sized. It was also a small place – only 15 or 16 villas and a shared pool. So it wasn’t a mass of screaming children and drunken bums.

Location, Location, Location

It proved to be a decent location, although it was a park they acquired from someone else, and which didn’t quite meet their normal accommodation standards. It was a good setting though. The Netherlands is easy to get around in. And we were maybe half an hour from Rotterdam, and hour from The Hague and 90 minutes from Amsterdam.

The Geocaching

My caching plan was maybe to do a couple whenever we went out somewhere. There were a couple of afternoons where the ladies of the house wanted to stay at Port Zelande, so on those I went out in the car for a while to grab some puzzle series I’d solved. I didn’t do a lot of geocaching, but enough to get by and enough to colour in a couple of new countries.