When we stayed in our Star Cubicle last weekend, of course we also explored the area a bit. We were in Twente, a region in the eastern part of The Netherlands. Not that far away, but I hadn’t been there before. Time to explore!

You can easily say we were in the middle of nowhere. We stayed in the cubicle for three days. The first day we didn’t do much besides relaxing, reading and having a campfire, but our second day we picked up a knapsack lunch and set out to explore. We were in the countryside that looked like most of my country: Polders: flat farmland devided by small ditches. There wasn’t that much to see until we came onto our destination: Springendal.

Before we left, we had looked at things nearby that we thought were worth to visit. There was a binder in our cubicle with lots of information, but when we googled the noteworthy places, we were a tad disappointed, because most of them didn’t look all that special to us. But Springendal looked cute so we decided to visit. Our walk took us about an hour to get there (we could have rented bicycles, being true dutchmen, but we rather walked).

Springendal

Springendal is a valley that has some natural sources and burial mounds but most of it is ‘just’ a forest. It was nice enough, very green and we walked there for a bit, though we didn’t have a particular route we followed, so we completely missed the lakes that were supposed to be there.

It was cute, the air was fresh and we had a lovely time, but after walking for two hours, we were rather cold and tired and we also had to walk the entire way back. So we decided to call it a day. We had wanted to visit Ootmarsum, as it’s not far away from Springendal, but decided we wanted to do that the next day.

So we headed back another route, and saw more of the countryside. We saw a lot of horses and birds, some cows, some sheep. Then, suddenly, Boyfriend called out: A kingfisher! I hadn’t seen it yet, but I looked to where he was pointing and then I saw a flicker of the most beautiful blue, hopping through the air. We followed it for a bit, trying to capture it’s beauty, but no such luck. It was so beautiful though, that we followed it for quite a while, feeling like we were in videogame on some kind of quest, until we lost track of it. I have never seen a Kingfisher before, and even though it was unfortunate I could not capture it with my camera, it was magical just seeing one right there!

Cold and tired, our energy had flared up a bit when we saw the kingfisher, but now it was rapidly descending again, we played the Alfabet game, naming first birds, then things on pizza’s, then things we didn’t want on pizza’s with every letter of the alfabet, and we had a lot of fun and laughed a lot, but we were happy when we finally were back inside our warm star cubicle.