Leiden; Sunday, 07 August, 2022

I had a bit of a lie in and after a late breakfast checked out of the hotel and walked the short distance over to the bus station to pick up a bus out to the coast.

My destination for the morning was the town of Katwijk aan Zee, located on the coast a few miles to the North West of Leiden and, technically, the mouth of the River Rhine. I headed to the mouth of one of Europe’s mightiest rivers only to find a small trickle of a river emptying into the sea amidst the sand dunes.

In reality, this is only the heavily sea defenced branch of the Rhine that runs through Leiden, and not the main part of the river which helps to form the port of Rotterdam and whose actual mouth is at the Hook of Holland some 20 miles further south. However, this particular branch does have historical importance as it did form part of the northern boundary of the Roman Empire on continental Europe. North of here are the barbarian lands that the Romans never conquered – Amsterdam included!

I had a wander down through the dunes of Katwijk which is a pleasant Dutch seaside resort with long sandy beaches and on a hot day an almost welcoming looking North Sea (Childhood experiences of swimming in the North Sea off Brighton and meeting some of the stuff that the 1980s Brits, French, Belgians and Dutch used to pump into the same sea putting me off swimming in it for life).

After wandering down the majority of the seafront I headed over to the bus stop and picked up the bus back into Leiden and from there wandered through the old town to the former studio of Jacob van Swanenburgh. Whilst you may never have heard of Jacob, you will probably have heard of one of his students a young local boy by the name of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, or just Rembrandt as the world now knows him. It was in this studio that the young Rembrandt was first introduced to art and his talent was first clearly on display. Toady the former studio is now a museum dedicated to Rembrandt’s time in the city before his move to Amsterdam in his early 20s.

Nearby to the Studio is the Pietrskerk, one of the largest churches in the city and one of the main locations where Pilgrim Fathers met before heading off to America. The pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers – John Robinson – is buried in the Church. Which makes it all the weirder that since the early 1970s the Church was deconsecrated and turned into an events space which means that were the high altar once was there is now a well-stocked bar.

From Pietrskerk it’s a short wander down to the canal and across into the grounds of the University and their botanical gardens the Hortus Botanicus. I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the gardens, taking in the views over the canals and the greenhouses before it was time to start heading back to the hotel to pick up my bag and make my way back to Schiphol.

Originally, I had planned to spend another couple of hours in Leiden, but for the previous few weeks there had been horror stories of security at Schiphol taking hours to clear. It had become so bad that even people arriving 3 hours before their flights were still missing them, though that had then led to people turning up so far in advance that they departures halls were becoming dangerously overcrowded. The airport had just instigated a new policy that you could only arrive 4 hours before your flight, but as you can imagine, that meant most people – including me – were getting to Schiphol 4 hours before departure time.

I’d made sure I’d prepared by heading to the toilet near the railway station at Schiphol before heading into the terminal so if I was held in a queue for a long time, it wouldn’t be so bad. 24 minutes later I was standing in the departure’s hall looking forward to a 3 ½ hour wait before my flight was due to depart, and that was despite the airport claiming that it was one of the busiest days of the year for them.

Thankfully I had access to the lounge, so the time passed quite quickly and pretty soon it was time to head down to the gate, board the flight and make our quick hop back across the North Sea to London.