By Jud Niven

It was a good weather day, probably one of the better days for Sunshine and no rain.  I understand that Alberta has been getting lots of intense thunderstorms this past week.

Today we drove to the Province of North Holland, in particular the city of Alkmaar. There is lots of road construction(same around the world) and we general try to avoid the major highways, so we went the long way.  The long way included driving over a shortcut actually…a dyke that stretched across the water from Lelystad to Enkhuizen.

Overhead shot of the dyke we drove on. Quite the engineering marvel!

Every Friday Alkmaar has a Cheese Festival that celebrates cheese making and how they would sell it, a tradition and ritual really that dates back to 1365.  Here is a link to their website that explains the whole history.  ALKMAAR CHEESE HISTORY.

Along with the hi-jinks of Cheese handling there was also a market going on all through the town centre which we perused and bought some tasty cheese.

After a beer and some lunch we ventured on to check out some of the beaches along the north sea.  Very nice little places with tonnes of beach area and places to stay.

A beach in the town of Bergen aan Zee

The rest of the drive home consisted of several red lights and several wrong turns.  A wrong turn is never really wrong because whereever we end up…we’ve never been there before!