After finally having survived our written finals and the very last day of high school in May 2007, one of my favorite travel companions, Carola (she is one of those artsy nerds like me) and I decided that we needed to do something  real crazy.

So, Carola’s family used to have this large Volkswagen van, which had a little hippie vibe to it, but they were about to get rid of it, since it was rather old. We felt like owing that car one last adventure, and thus came up with the idea of a road trip to the Netherlands – just beach, and back.

We packed a bunch of food, a weird self-made camping grill, an old map, and blankets… and drove straight to the beach, without heading anywhere specific. Somewhere close to the coast, we stopped at one of those fancy campgrounds with pool, and animation programs, but it was just way too expensive and not at all crazy enough.

So we just asked for another camping ground in that area, and heard about this place called Monster. That really sounded like the exact “schools-out-baby-kind-of-craziness” we were aiming for… I think, we honestly just wanted to say the sentence “I stayed a night in Monster” (bummer, they don’t print that on t-shirts!).

The camping ground there was tiny and very poorly equipped – basically it was just a meadow in the dunes with little wooden sticks in the ground to mark the borders of the camp spots, there weren’t even trees to give shade. Good thing, it was raining and actually pretty freezing for this time of the year so we needn’t worry about getting sunburnt.

But we came to see the beach – and that’s what we did! Although it was really cold, we took summery pictures with our feet in the water… since without this kind of photos a road trip to the beach is just not the real thing, right?

After warming up and relaxing on the camping ground, and cooking dinner on the hilarious self-made cooking thingy, we strolled a little through the cute city of Monster, as it finally stopped to rain again. We fell in love we the adorable tiny houses and the Dutch way of rural infrastructure, but had to realize that Monster has nothing more to offer than its name. Since the camp ground lay in the dunes close to the beach, Carola and I spend our evening on the beach… with a bottle of champagne, and lot of mandatory girl talk…

After a chilly night in the cozy Volkswagen van (with the luxury of an actual mattress), we left not so monstrous Monster behind, and drove towards the city of Scheveningen, which was a half an hour drive along the coast.

Scheveningen is a district of the well-known city Den Haag, and used to be a small fishery village, which turned into the Netherland’s most famous coastal resort. Of course, we were headed to see the harbor and the large seafront. Unfortunately the weather still wasn’t on our side, so that the wonderful beach bar we found to have coffee at, could only partly offer us a beach feeling…

Then we slowly started to drive back toward the German border, but of course, we lost our way, somewhere in the middle of Den Haag. We strayed around for a while, and tried to ask someone for directions, but it was a holiday and all the shops were closed. Well, not all the shops… Carola saw one of the infamous Dutch coffee shops and went in… So, guys, we did actually enter a place to buy weed legally, but our sole agenda was to ask for directions! Seriously! Oh, we were just so innocent back then…