Vlieland

We had a few glorious days on Texel, cycled two 40 KM each routes on Sunday and Monday. The weather cooperated by being sunny and with little wind. Still quite cold, no more than about 13 C but when cycling that's OK and on Monday we even had to take our jackets off! We did both the Southern and Northern 'Thijsse routes', with some adaptations to take us past points w especially wanted to see (and avoid other ones). The diversity of birdlife and nature is quite surprising, no wonder that it was (and still is, I guess) a biologist's dream. Being spring, the meadows were full of lambs (Texel is not called the 'sheep island' for nothing) and there are wild Daffodils everywhere along the roads. I will work out how to post pictures on the blog when we are back in London and share some.
We were planning to go to Vlieland on Tuesday but as it was blowing quite hard (5-6 Bft), we decided to take a rest day. Today it was 4-5 Bft and we had a comfortable 5 hour trip over the Western Waddenzee to Vlieland, the last bit over the shallows of the 'Franse Gaatje' which was interesting as we could not easily find the 'prikken', the little trees that mark the channel.
We are now safely tied up in the marina on Vlieland. As in Texel and Den Helder, it is very quiet; the season has not really started yet, I suspect that comes at Easter in 10 days' time. But we do share the marina here with about 30 or so 50+ foot motor boats which are on some cruise together. Poor little "Onbekommerd" looks very small in between them, but we are very happy that we can just step out on the jetty without a stepladder and that we can easily swing the boat around!
The plan is to stay here two nights (until Friday) and then move to Terschelling for the weekend. The weather forcast continue to be reasonable good!