Day Trips: Enkhuizen, The Netherlands and the outdoor Zuiderzee Museum

"You ain't much if you ain't Dutch" says the colloquial expression. Indeed, Dutch history proves how hard working the Dutch were, creating land out of seas and creating trade and the first ever company with shareholders in their golden age sea faring days.  In the fishing village of Enkhuizen, on the Ijsselmeer coast, about a 45 minute northern drive from Amsterdam, there is an outdoor museum, Zuiderzee (south sea) which exhibits an earlier Dutch fishing village kept in its original form.  To reach the museum you are taken by ferry across the water  opposite  literally scores of sail boats anchored in the Enkhuizen harbour. It needs a full day to explore as there are restaurant stops, fish shops and the village actually has houses which you can enter so it is actually in-and-outdoor.  

Arriving at the museum you are greeted by three old coal chimneys and old heating systems are re-simulated to envisage old times.    

  The museum consists of an entire village of houses, shops, little streets, canals and squares with traditionally dressed actors  fixing fishing nets, cooking and doing laundry the old fashioned way.  You can walk the streets and enter each house of which many had a flourishing vegetable garden, scarecrows and flowers, and old furnishings of the time.  Quite splendid as there is so much to see!

 

                                  

As you meander through the little streets over bridges and a canal, there are green slopes with pigs and sheep in pastoral rural scenes before you enter the little village centre with its commercial shops.

 
    

  Wandering along the inner canal back to the water edge past boathouses and fishing nets is the characteristic Dutch windmill, with ducks, a wooden fence and water reflections.  Behind, sail many boats in typical summer holiday atmosphere and scenery.  

 

 
On the ferry over from Enkhuizen there and back in summer, there are plenty of  lovely sail ships which made up for the cancelled Sail 2020, a global event in Amsterdam that is held once every 5 years. 

 

That's all folks, if you live in NL, or visit as a tourist, be sure not to miss the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen. Bon voyage!