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The Netherlands

Visiting the Netherlands by plane

image Because I have been learning Dutch over the past year or so, I have been flying to Holland on a regular basis to practice both my flying and my (very poor) language skills.

Here are a few articles on this blog about my various Dutch flying experiences and some interesting places to visit when you get there.

Lelystad Aerodrome (EHLE)

I flew to Lelystad, Holland on Saturday. It’s a purpose-built GA airport about 30m east of Amsterdam. The flight from Denham was fabulous in good weather – we flew right over the top of Schiphol at 9,000 feet.

The airport is very welcoming. They have customs and immigration officers on site (although the book says to give four hours notice) and there is a cafe in the small terminal building. The landing fee was around €50 which compares well with about €300 for the same Cirrus at Schiphol the week before.

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Although Lelystad has NDB approaches, they are only active outside daylight hours. Arriving in daylight, you have to end your IFR flight plan just past Amsterdam and descend below 1,500 feet.

The best part about Lelystad is that there is a aviation-themed cafe (with staff in pilot uniforms!) called Flantuas and an excellent aircraft museum – the Aviodrome. Both are a few minutes walk from the terminal.

Flantuas – with aircraft models and a view of the runway

Lelystad’s reconstruction of the Schiphol’s terminal building from the 30s

Outside the Aviodrome with a view of their KLM 747

Day trips to Amsterdam

Screenshot3 I have flown to Amsterdam twice in the last six weeks.  Schiphol is pretty much the largest and busiest airport a private pilot can visit in a single engine aircraft.  Try landing at Heathrow and see what happens!  It’s not cheap (about 250 Euros) but worth it for the experience. You can fly in VFR and I did this a couple of years ago. But these trips involved the full IFR arrival and radar vectored ILSs. 

The planning feels a bit daunting – you need to book handling with KLM JetCenter and make sure you have the necessary slot booked. Then you need to read the pages and pages of Jeppesen notes for the airfield as well as the usual IFR stuff like GARs, flight plans and so on. Although it has loads of runways, once you know which one you’re going to (and they told me when I was half way across the North Sea) it was just like an ILS approach anywhere. Nothing to be daunted by.

When I went in March, they vectored me for an ILS on runway 36R and then I broke right at a few hundred feet to land on 04 which runs up to the GA parking area. Yesterday, they told me to expect 18R (which is a couple of miles taxi from the GA terminal) and then changed it to 22.  They brought me in on a four mile final and I had to drop down from FL70 in short order.  I still managed to put it down on the numbers and make the first exit right into the GA parking area.  Great fun, especially with a 12 knot gusting crosswind.Screenshot1

In March I went with my Dutch teacher to practice my Dutch. We went to the Anne Frank house, a pancake restaurant and then she had me visiting various shops trying (in very broken Dutch) to find and buy different things.  Yesterday, I went with a couple of friends to visit the Rijksmuseum and we had lunch at Hans and Grietje, a cafe nearby.

P1020755The main museum is closed for rebuilding but there’s a newly-refurbished wing open around the corner. It’s much less indigestible than the main museum used to be. With so little space, only the best work makes the cut. Every object and painting is the best of the best. There are four Vermeers and more more Rembrandts than you can shake a stick at. Including the famous Night Watch.  It took a couple of hours to visit and every moment was thoroughly enjoyable.

The light of Holland favours paintings even when it is grey and overcast but yesterday it was sunny and warm. It is hard to imagine a more pleasant place to be on such a day than Amsterdam.

Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague

Mauritshuis Museum It might seem a bit self-indulgent to fly all the way to Holland to go to a museum, but the Mauritshuis in The Hague (Den Haag in Dutch) is worth it.

It is home to some of the greatest masterpieces of Dutch painting in the world, including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and the View of Delft (which ripples with light and texture on canvas but defies reproduction). I loved the way that Vermeer’s girl catches your eye across the room. “Don’t look at that painting of a Goldfinch,” she says. “Look at me.” Michiel Sweert’s eyes down, demure painting of a young maid is the perfect companion.Girl with a Pearl Earring

When I visited there was also an exhibition of Dutch portraiture which had displaced much of the permanent collection. I was delighted to see it, however, because I had missed it in London, despite buying tickets in advance and generally intending to go for weeks on end. This exhibition ends on 13th January 2008 so I just caught it.

Besides the Vermeers, there are some world-famous paintings – some Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp or Fabritius’s Goldfinch, for example – but the less familiar (but equally noteworthy) paintings are not ashamed in their company. I enjoyed them more because of the joy of discovering something beautiful for the first time. Who knew that paintings of church interiors or people skating on the ice could be so enchanting?

image It is a compact museum. The basement contains the obligatory shop and cafe and there are just two floors of exhibitions. With so little space, every painting has to be a masterpiece and they don’t disappoint.

The museum doesn’t overwhelm. The modest scale of the rooms and the well-judged organisation of the paintings mean that you can go to the Mauritshuis and emerge a couple of hours later without feeling like you’ve run a cultural marathon (as at, say, the Louvre or the Met in New York). It’s art without the pain barrier.

Information

Website: www.mauritshuis.nl

Address: Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague

Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday 10am-5pm, Sundays and holidays 11am-5pm

Admission: €9.50

Nearest airport: Rotterdam

Rotterdam (EHRD)

Airport information

Nearest town: Rotterdam (about 15 minutes by car), The Hague (Den Haag, about 30 minutes by car), Delft (about 20 minutes by car)

Opening times: H24

Longest runway: 2200m, Asphalt

Fuel: 100LL, Jet A1

Phone: 01271 919 9000

Website: www.rotterdam-airport.nl, Wikipedia entry

Netherlands AIP with plates and airport information

Airport picture

KLM Jet Center Rotterdam

KLM Jet Center at Rotterdam Airport

Airport map

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Facilities

  • Handling: KLM Jet Center (+31 (0) 10 298 4949, www.jetcenter.nl). Expect to pay around £170-230 for a light aircraft including a return taxi trip to Delft, Rotterdam or The Hague. Handling is mandatory and expensive but very helpful. They can sort out your flight plan, weather, ground transport and so on. There is a comfortable pilot lounge and computers for accessing the internet. KLM Jet Center is very suave but a (slightly) cheaper option for handling is Avia Partners. Their handling runs to about £70 and then you have to pay a landing fee to the airport authorities of around £20. However, you don’t get the red carpet treatment and you have to go through the main terminal security checks (take the crew line, not the passenger line) and then wait for a crew bus to the plane. It takes 30m or so to get from curb to plane compared to 5m at KLM.  Your money, your time, your choice!
  • Taxis. There is a taxi rank at the main terminal but it is a five minute walk from the GA terminal.
  • Car hire. Avis (+31 (0)10-4332233), Europcar (+31 (0)10-4371826), Hertz (+31 (0)10-4158239), Sixt (+31 (0)10-4627221), National (+31 (0)10-2865966).

On the airport or within walking distance

  • Restaurants. The Grand Cafe / Restaurant Horizon is located airside in the main terminal.

Restaurants

Activities

  • Delft. Delft is a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport. A beautiful town full of canalside cafes and shops, like a scaled down and more intimate Amsterdam. It was Vermeer’s home town although little remains of his presence (although a Vermeer centre reopened in January 2008.) There are many shops selling the famous Delft Blue porcelain but there is also a factory shop and museum outside the town centre.
  • Mauritshuis Museum. Fantastic and delightfully compact museum of Dutch painting in The Hague. Read the Golf Hotel Whiskey review.

Useful information

Parkheuvel Restaurant

I fly from a small airfield, Denham, in Northwest London. Because it is sandwiched between Luton and Heathrow airspace, it is always a challenge to gain altitude and join airways quickly. On the day of our trip to Parkheuvel, I was lucky. A friendly controller let me begin the climb within minutes of take off and we quickly reached 8,000 feet over North London. The view over the city was crystal clear. The flight to Rotterdam was over quickly and we taxied up to KLM’s smart private aviation terminal. A taxi was already waiting and we went from the plane to the car in under five minutes.

Parkheuvel entrance

I had been looking forward to visiting Parkheuvel for a long time. It is one of just three restaurants in Holland to have three Michelin stars. Unfortunately, the restaurant didn’t live up to the occasion or its reputation.

The food – lobster salad and sea bass for me – was well cooked. The location was charming: a modern building on the strand between a park and the river Maas. But Parkheuvel was badly let down by the service, which was slow and absent-minded. For example, the pre-starters were delivered without the cutlery to eat them and the coffees we ordered never appeared. We may have caught them on an off day as the place had changed hands a few weeks before our visit. However, if it wants to keep the three stars of a world-class restaurant, the new owner, Erik van Loo, will have to get a grip.

Contact information

Parkheuvel
Heuvellaan 21
Rotterdam
The Netherlands

Tel. +31 (0)10 436 0766

Fax. +31 (0)10 43 67 140

E-Mail: info@parkheuvel.nl

www.parkheuvel.nl

Important information

Lunch & dinner
Monday-Friday
12.00-14.30 and 18.30-22.00
Saturday
18.30-22.00
Closed on Sundays

Nearest Airport

Rotterdam (10km, 15 minutes by car)

Nearby Towns

  • Rotterdam
  • The Hague (Den Haag)