A night out.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went on the first camping trip of the year. We packed our bags and our bikes and did an overnighter in a small bit of nature-reserve in a place called "Hardinxveld-Giessendam". Unfortunately wildcamping as it is seen in other countries is not really possible in the Netherlands. There are places, however, where our governmental forest management (Staatsbosbeheer) has placed a pole in the ground, and in a proximity of 10 or 20 meters of this pole you are allowed to camp for 72 hours. I think that in terms of legal overnighters in nature, these places are as good as it gets in the Netherlands. For our night out we picked an area that has large areas of wet lands that are planted with willow for the production of willow-shoots. These fields are called "grienden", and a few of them are still coppiced every 3 of 4 years. Since the demand for "griend"-wood went down years ago, many of these areas became nature reserves and are now the home of many bird and animal species. The area that we camped in even houses some beavers!

The site we went to is accesible by bike, but it does mean biking through fields and mud for a good while. If the weather would have been less dry for the past days it would have been more tricky.

Me entering the nature reserve.

 Here is the pole indicating the campsite. Unfortunately people had made quite a mess of it, and there was ash from fires and glass shards about. We therefore had to set up just outside the indicated zone.

Here is how we set up our tiny camp. Our tent kept out of the wind with a 3x3 tarp folded in half as a windscreen. If it would have rained we could unfold it and use the other half to create a dry area outside of the tent.

I couldn`t have spend a night in an area with so much willow in it without trying some basketry. Unfortunately I had no idea what I  was doing so I was very unsuccesful. I`ll have to find out how to do this properly once.

Dinner is always welcome, but especially so after spending hours having fun outside. The girlfriend prepared a lovely porkstew with red wine that we cooked on a pop can stove.

While dinner was cooking I gathered some branches and prepared firewood for the hobo-stove. We were in need of a small fire to keep the mosquitos at bey that started popping up.

The next morning I went for an early walk around to explore the area. I found this willow that was surprised to see me. I also saw many birds, and at one point got startled by a hare that followed my path in the opposite direction.

A path trought one of the large willow fields.

 Here are some trees that are gnawed down by beavers in the area. I didn`t get great shots of the burrow that was close to these trees, but on the picture you can see an entrance and a canal going towards it.

After some tea and breakfast in the morning sun it was time to pack up and go home again. Here is our camping spot after the clean up.

I had a great time camping. It was my first time camping at one of these pole-camping sites and I enjoyed it. I hope to explore a couple of different ones in the future.