Weekend at Dwingelderveld National Park, Drenthe Netherlands

Our weekend at Dwingelderveld was a truly unique experience. Dwingelderveld National Park is one of the National parks in the Netherlands. Open all year round you can visit for the day to hike and explore, or decide to rent a place to stay for longer. Founded in 1991, the landscape is made up of health lands with many sandy hills and wetlands. The park covers 37km2 and is home to sheep, three types of snakes and several rare butterflies. Take your hiking boots and prepare yourself for the Dutch weather as this is a perfect place for a weekend away.

We booked this weekend away a month ago for some peace and relaxation. We picked a little rented house with a little kitchen and living space at the RCN De Noordster. It was easy to pick this area because Lennart had been there before with his family more than 10 years ago, so it was lovely to go back for him.

I did my research, as I normally do, about what we can do there. However this was no holiday abroad and the focus was to relax and go walking in the National Park Dwingelderveld. I printed out some of the recommended walking routes as well as knowing where the pancake house was!

Since we did not have access to a car for the weekend, it took us roughly 2.5 hours to get there by train and bus. We both had a bag each with warm clothes for a cold spring weekend in the North. We also took our brand new DSLR camera that we invested in a few days before the weekend. So it was the first time we would be practicing with our new camera skills.

First Day On Our Weekend At Dwingelderveld

We started the Saturday morning by 10am and decided to walk the 13km route around the national park. We started at number 7 where our little house was situated and walked anti-clockwise. On Friday night it had rained so we were happy to see the dry forecast for our weekend.

It took as faster than we expected and we added on a few extra km’s to our 13km walk making it nearly 20km! It was dry cloudy weather was great for walking too, any sunnier and it would of been too hot! Our weekend at Dwingelderveld would definitely be an active one.

The Bospub was the pancake house we arrived at for dinner on Saturday. We had reached over 35 thousand steps on my Fitbit so it definitely was time for dinner, where I chose my favourite pancake with cheese, bacon and syrup!

Saturday evening after a few hours resting in the warm, we headed back out to Planetron which was only 25 minute walk from our little rented house. We attended the 8pm showing which involved a museum and an interactive live planetarium. It was very interesting and got to see some fantastic photos of the moon and planets that had been taken with their telescope. Our showing followed lastly by being able to look through the biggest professional telescope in the Netherlands at the stars and a planet that was aligned with Earth. Luckily for us the cloudy sky had cleared up and the planet we could see was Jupiter with its 4 moons!

Second Day On Our Weekend At Dwingelderverld

Sunday morning we decided to rent bicycles from the RCN park and make our way around the left side of the National park that went on further than the walking route. Cycling of course was much faster and easier as the national park had a bike path. We discovered the left side had some beautiful lakes and a better place to spot birds.

By the evening we headed into Dwingeloo, the small local village with a supermarket, pharmacy and post office. Bought some delicious ice cream at Fanelli’s Ijs & Koffee and cycled back home, passing some tulip fields. These tulip fields were gorgeous to walk past.

We finished our enjoyable weekend with a late night cycle to watch the sunset. For the whole weekend we had reached up to 52 thousand steps on my Fitbit, which is interesting to see. Our weekend at Dwingelderveld is the perfect relaxing place for a short weekend away.