Leeuwarden Bos. (Leeuwarden Forest). De Kalkvaart
This week Marja and I decided to use our bicycles and continue to look around Leeuwarden. Just 100 meters from Bilgaard shopping center who would have thought that you have such a beautiful spot in which to walk, unwind, forget ones worries and simply enjoy nature at its best (and I am ashamed to say), I have always shopped at Bilgaard, have heard of Leeuwarden Bos, but have not explored it this far, as I did not know that it extended so far. The last time I was anywhere near this spot was around 8 years ago when my family and I first cycled to Wyns, the Leeuwarden Municipality have done alot of work since then. Let us take you on a excursion of Leeuwarden Bos.
First of all one would say, (if you are a regular visitor there), what is there to offer, well there is lots of attractive things to do.Walking, camping, jogging,fishing,sight seeing,unwinding,relaxing etc; sounds like a vacation brochure, in a way it is.
We first cycled from Westeinde to a camping sight, parked our bicycles and took a look aroundat our surroundings, my first impression was, wow a camping sight, a lovely farmhouse with camping facilities and on a field nearby unusual cattle grazing contentidly at the grass, which Marja tells me that they are free grazing cattle. How wonderful.
We then walked along the edge of Bilgaard and came across wild crocuses, unusual tree's and fawner.
Winter Crocuses
As we were walking we came across people doing all sorts of things, jogging, walking their dogs, cats roaming, people growing vegetables and flowers on little bits of land they have hired to do their hobbie's, and what is also nice seeing these people talking to each other and sharing their news of the day or information of their crop etc, and that they are very friendly as we walked past they greeted us as we took photo's, who says the dutch are not friendly, in Friesland they are, good old Friesland.
We continued our walk and came across another stretch of the neighbourhood and found that there were houses built in most unusual shapes and forms.
First of all one set reminded me of the old train cariages, the top floors of the houses were built in wood with small windows and the roof was in a half cylindrical shape.
The second set was built with the mixture of wood and concrete the front rooms (lounge area-Woon kammer), was built semi-round with wooden sheds (schuurtjes), built at the back of the house.
A third set of houses, which I thought fitted perfectly in the surroundings were made completely out of wood but except for one thing I did not like in particular was the orange tiles they had added on the face of the houses, to me this spoilt them.
We then proceeded our walk and came accross a pond, immediatly when I saw this stretch that surrounded the pond I thought, this was the ideal place to build a wooden hut or log cabin, with a terrace built over the water (it also came to mind that the wooden log cabin would look like the one in the english fable Hansel and Gretel, if it were to be built here), and people could have tea and cake and hire cannoes, fishing tackle, water treading boats, etc; this I think would be a added bonus.
I loved the little concrete pillars they built along the paths with signs pointing to various directions this reminded me of tourist places and game keeping places we came across in Rhodesia and South Africa, this added a very nice ambiance to the area.
With this all in mind it was time to go back to the bicycles and go home, what a lovely time I had Leeuwarden Bos here I come again.
I beleive a eclipse had taken place around 11 o'clock this morning, but there was so much cloud cover, that we did not see it though we did find out we had to use the flash on the camera a lot for the photo's so I guess this was the reason why. Till next week.
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