Texel, the biggest island of the Netherlands

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What best to do on a warm spring morning when you’re in the Netherlands then head out to Texel? Texel is one of the biggest Island’s in the North West of the Netherlands. It’s the biggest of the 5 Netherlands Islands - but not too big to bike around all day. And that’s just what we did.

Saturday morning, 2 May 2009, getting up at about 7:30am, we left the house about 40 minutes later to catch the bus to Amsterdam Sloterdijk station (cost = 2 strips on the strippen kart or one zone). From there we caught the train to Den Helder (which is about €13.45 return with 40% discount). The train trip to Den Helder took us about an hour. When we got to Den Helder we caught bus number 33 (which is right next to the station to the port Steiger TESO Boot (which is the finishing stop of bus 33). This didn’t cost us anything as the bus driver was too far away for us to stamp our tickets (same thing more or less happened on the way back). Once we got to the port we caught the boat (€3 per person) to the port of Den Hoorn Texel.

So ok the journey might take you about 2 and a half hours but it’s well worth the trip. Our first port of call on the island was to get bikes. Bikes, as those of you who vigorously follow my blog without fail probably know, are an essential form of transport in the Netherlands. The rustier and crazier they look the better. In the hire shop just by the port of Texel, we got ourselves some nice brand spanking new oma fiets for €5.50 for the day (without gears). For Isabella we got a kids kaart (€5.50).

After adjusting sizes and grabbing a map from a lady who works at fiets (bike) hire place we hopped on our bikes and headed toward the first village on our route - Den Hoorn. About 470 people live here according to Wikipedia (but this is from stats in 2005) so perhaps the population is more closer to 760 or something like that. Anyways Den Hoorn was a cute little town with a church - we stopped nearby to have a picnic with some chips (or crisps as the British call them) and cheese and bread. We fed Isabella also and let her roam and pat horses and touch stuff.

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