North Holland - Monnickendam, Marken

During our stay in Zuiderwoude, a village which I introduced you in my previous post, we visited several villages in the neighbourhood.

As the Netherlands is famous for an excellent cycling infrastructure, we could take advantage of bike routes from our village up to Monnickendam - a small fishing village and a port, which was our first stop.

We were admiring many various types of boats and ships which were anchored in the port.

And also the typical Dutch architecture.

The streets were very narrow, paved by bricks and paving stones. We had a short stop in the local tourist information center to get some tips for our next rides. The ladies in the center were so amused by our kick scooters that they went out to see them.

After some kilometers up to north, we reached another small town - Volendam. We were heading directly to the port as we wanted to take a boat trip to Marken situated on a small peninsula.

The journey on a small boat took us about 45 minutes.

We didn´t spend much time in Marken, we just enjoyed the port, touched the sea...

... admired the monument built as a memory of great floods in 1916...

... and chose a yacht which we will buy next time 😀

There was also some time left for coffee in a local small café - being constantly watched by curious birds.

When we got back to Volendam, we decided to explore also the centre of the town which was quite small, crowded but very picturesque.

Fortunately, we managed to take some photos without any people...

... but with some curious animals again.

Getting back home, we were following bike paths and finally saw a typicall Dutch mill.

The rest of our journey led through fields lined by numerous canals and wonderful landscape.

To get the overview of the whole trip, you can see the map below.

Mapy.cz