Dunes revisited

After admiring the flower floats at the Bulbflower Parade in Sassenheim yesterday (20 huge cars decorated with uncountable amount of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths), this morning I drove our guests to Keukenhof. This world famous tulip park is in full blossom these days. Also, it is packed with Chinese tourists. It was very early and I wanted to spend a quiet moment so I decided to return to the dunes again.

I chose the water supply dunes of Amsterdam (Amsterdamse waterleidingduinen), a natural area behind the North Sea beach stretching from Noordwijk to Zandvoort. Here the drinking water for the residents of Amsterdam is being ‘produced’ by the natural process of filtering the rain water through the dune sand.  After 12 years in NL, I still have trouble believing that so close to Amsterdam, the landscape can look this rough and beautiful.

The run took me about 5 km into the dune area. It was sunny and quite windy but most of all: empty. It felt like I had the dunes for myself – just checking the animal tracks, trying to spot some water birds and enjoying the fresh air in my lungs. After 10 km it was hard to get back into the car… but the Sunday breakfast at home (hopefully with some interesting updates of other bloggers) was tempting too.

Running the dunes

Saturday was our first morning without April – sunny and bright sky but the house was awfully quiet and we both felt rather empty. We decided to gear up with our new Team AprilRuns running shirts and hit the road to the dunes near Noordwijk. We have the 1/2M distance to run next month so why not to try how far we could go today.

We parked the car and quickly found a forest trail at the edge of the dunes. The views over the blossoming tulip fields were fantastic:

As we ran on, the paths started to fill up with bikers, hikers and other runners. Also, the paths started getting a bit hilly.

After about 7 km’s, we tested our fast-energy banana sticks (grrrr, awful) and decided to run further. Then at 10 km’s, our legs still felt fresh enough to continue and we decided to check the beach café nearby (well – sort of nearby). The truth is: we did not want to return to our quiet house… so we ended up with the total of 16.5 km, V’s longest run ever.