Monday. We left Groningen and drove towards the German border through the towns of Assen and Emmen to Kamp Westerbork. Kamp Westerbork was a WW2 concentration camp. There is a museum there where you go first. The museum is excellent. They have a large collection of personal items from the 100,000 Jews that went through this camp. They have suitcases with a few personal effects. That really brings the experience to life. They have many photos displayed on the walls, film footage of survivors talking years later about their experiences. Unfortunately that is all in Dutch but you can get an idea from it all.

From the museum it is about 3km to the actual camp. Most of it was torn down in the 1970’s but has been re-created in part. There barbed wire fence has been put back. Parts of the concrete buildings remained. The rest has been marked out to show where the various buildings were. Outside the fence the camp commandant’s house is intact. There was an area where the people were taken and loaded on the trains. There they have placed 100,000 blocks to commemorate the people who were sent to their deaths. It is very moving indeed.

We then set off into the countryside in search of Hunnebunen or Monoliths. We stopped in the tiny village of Borger to get a map of where to find the Hunnebunen. Borger is a very pretty little village with lots of thatched roof houses.

We drove down narrow winding lanes and then walked down little tracks between rows of potatoe plants on farms to find the collections of pre-historic rocks.

Our next destination was the town of Zwolle. Zwolle was much bigger than we expected. We had our trusty tom tom to assist us in navigating the narrow little lanes and one way streets into the historic centre in search of the tourist office.

It was on our way out of town that we had trouble. The Tom Tom took us up a one way street the wrong way. It was only seconds to realise we were going the wrong way but suddenly there appeared a policeman on a bicycle to tell us we were going the wrong way. He said follow me and he rode his bike ahead of us and directed us all the way through the little streets out to a main road. That was so nice of him. We have found the Dutch people to be very friendly and very helpful.

From Zwolle we went to the tiny fishing village of Urk. Urk used to be island along with Schokland who for hundreds of years eked out and existence on a narrow island in the Zuiderzee. Schokland was eventually swallowed up by the Noordoostpolder just like Urk and you now drive over some bridges to reach both places.. In Urk some of the locals still wear traditional costume. We didn’t see anyone dressed traditionally but we did see a man working on his boat wearing clogs.