Days 26-27 (July 2-3) - Katwijk and Leiden

Got off the ferry at the Hook of Holland at 5pm dutch time and drove (on the wrong side of the road, with surprisingly few near death moments) to our first stop at the seaside town of Katwijk where we staying at the Beach Hostel Holland which was a really nice hostel, with noone else in our room and an ensuite and balcony looking out over the town. The drive was a constant flow of big wind turbines (apparently the dutch have upgraded from windmills), little canals along the sides of the road and separating the fields (which gives it this really open feel without the British style hedges or fences) and greenhouses. Everyone in Holland seems to ride bikes everywhere (there is bike lanes on pretty much every road) and a surprisingly large portion of them are young, female and blonde. Holland makes a pretty great first impression. Walked around Katwijk, found this cool place that did Chinese style burgers (essentially normal burgers but with awesome sauce) and fries with mayo (those dutch are onto something with them) then went back to the hostel (via its bar).

In the morning the hostel put on an awesome buffet breakfast, bread, cereal, juice, tea/coffee and lots of cheese, meat and spreads (apparently chocolate spread is big here. It certainly seems to be) and had a late checkout time of 12, so we gorged ourselves, lazed around and checked out at 11:59. On a whim we decided to go check out a town called Leiden, which was an excellent call. Leiden is a very nice, non-touristy town with two massive, very impressive, free entry, churches, an old "ruined" fort (for a ruined fort its pretty intact) which looks out over the whole city and lots of awesome canals intersecting all over the place. Found lunch in a little place near Pieterskerk (the main church) called Fresh'n'Fast (despite the English name it was very non-touristy and very lucky one of the 3 people working spoke English) which did these incredible burgers. After lunch wandered back to Cumu, who we had to park on the edge of the town, only getting slightly trapped now and then by the canal system before heading to Amsterdam.