Autumn Holiday

View from our accommodation in 's-Hertogenbosch

Just as we thought that summer would never end, we had a sudden heavy frost. Autumn has arrived in style this year.

Even though end of summer always surprises me, I think it is our strange gite season that has really confused my seasonal clock this year. We do not normally have many guests in September, we wind down gently from the busy summer months into the autumn and then we close for the winter. This year the guests have kept coming and coming. The later in the season it became, the more people we have had visiting us. Everything has been so much later this year, including the hot weather and this has all compounded to profoundly confuse me!

Typical "street" scene in Amsterdam

Being fully booked for September (the first time ever in the ten years we have been open) there was no holiday for us during that month, so a two week visit to The Netherlands was planned for October. Nice and relaxed this time, to enable us to visit everyone we wanted to and not have to rush around like lunatics from one place to another. But the gite bookings just kept coming, a couple of days were initially shaved off the end of our holiday and then some more days were shaved off the beginning and so our two weeks ended up as four days.

What is The Netherlands without a windmill.....

... or bicycles and canals?

The great thing about living here is that we can just pop to The Netherlands for four days without too much trouble and now that there are fewer tourists on the road, the journey is really quite relaxed.

So there we were last weekend, as our guests left the gite on Saturday morning, packed and ready to go. We were easily in The Netherlands in time for dinner.

That evening we went to see a light show in 's-Hertogenbosch, part of the year of Hieronymus Bosch. We missed the light show when we visited during the exhibition of his work back in May as one of the buildings it was to be projected on collapsed a few days before we arrived. We were very disappointed at the time and so it was a pleasant surprise to be able to actually see it this time and it and gave a very holidayish feel to start of our short break.

Amsterdam flower market in autumn.

The next day on to Amsterdam and a chance to see old favourites including the Van Gogh museum and just to wander around and enjoy the sites and sounds.

So that’s it for our autumn holiday, hopefully we will have better luck organising our spring holiday, but on the other hand if we fail to do that one, it means we have an excellent start to our renting season – difficult choice!


For information on holiday accommodation within one day's drive of The Netherlands click here.