The corona crisis is currently having a very concrete effect on camping boss Wijnand van Triest (49): he has to hire extra receptionists. And a cleaning company. A professional animation team too, to entertain the children who suddenly ride around here on scooters and fantasize out loud what the ice cream shop has to offer. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, it has been so busy at camping De Grebbelinie in Renswoude, just below Amersfoort, that Van Triest has to call in help.
It took a virus to let the Dutch go on holiday en masse in their own country. More or less mandatory, many holiday resorts are simply inaccessible. Precise figures on the number of Dutch people who have exchanged the foreign for the domestic are not yet available, they will probably be published in the autumn of the ANWB. But every industry association in the recreation sector recognizes the trend. Young families who would otherwise have driven to France or Italy are moving closer to home this year with their station wagons.
For example, through the leafy Utrechtse Heuvelrug. Slowly chasing large tractors that drive no faster than forty, on roads with traffic signs that warn of crossing deer, on their way to the Van Triest campsite.
The camping boss has to work
His days have become a lot longer: suddenly he has to work until ten o’clock in the evening, while until last year after five o’clock he usually didn’t have much to do as a camping owner. He arrives a little later than agreed – first the toilet blocks had to be replaced with new toilet paper.
“Before corona, older people mainly came here to cycle or walk,” says Van Triest about the difference with other years. “You spend a little less time on that: they don’t need much from the reception and they usually cook their meals themselves.”
The most satisfied-looking couple in the Netherlands, the Hagenzen Aart and Henny van Dalen, have also displayed an entire kitchen next to their caravan. They are the longest-serving camping guests at De Grebbelinie, coming here for seventeen years now. “When I turned sixty, we drew a circle on the map to look for a campsite where we could go once in a while, at most an hour’s drive from The Hague,” says Aart in his South Randstad accent. while he puts his advanced sudoku booklet on the side table.
That became this spot. “In the beginning, Aart was still busy with his work”, adds Henny, “and we always left the city on Friday evening to come back on Monday. We are now here all season.” Nice and quiet. Aart: “At home we have the dunes, that’s nature too. But to cycle in it all day.”
This year there are also many younger people on ‘their’ campsite. It’s not packed full. Camping De Grebbelinie has 150 pitches, which Van Triest has deliberately set far apart. And even if he wanted to: he may not increase that number without consulting the municipality, even if the clientele is in line this year. “In recent weeks, people regularly say that they had already called ten campsites before they could go here.”
Full is full, agrees Ellen Kok-Hendriks, president of Vekabo, the association for rural campsites. “So I don’t recognize that people would sit on the lip together this year in places where it is normally super quiet.”
Aart and Henny are also not bothered by all those new visitors. “At the reception they are wise enough not to put those families with children on this field, but further down by the pond”, says Henny. Aart points to a place where someone recently visited a crying grandchild. “But that was really all in terms of nuisance, you know. And we like a little excitement, by the way.”
The trick is now to retain those new guests in the coming years, says Van Triest. “I hope they keep coming back.” A good high season, such as now, provides as much income as the early and late seasons combined. He seems more of a doer than a talker, and now works hard to make it all as beautiful as possible. See the swimming pond, which was built a few years ago, where a few parents now paddle with babies, the luxurious safari lodges, or the food truck-in-the-making, which he works on in his spare hours.
Vekabo chairman Kok-Hendriks, who owns a few holiday homes and a bed & breakfast, thinks that the Netherlands automatically sells itself as a holiday destination. “I am already hearing from surprised people in their twenties and thirties how nice it is to cycle here. Especially because the Dutch landscape is so varied. In Germany and France you sometimes cycle for days on end along nothing but grain fields.”
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According to philosopher Ruud Welten, vacation is a collective neurosis. ‘And I mean that quite literally’
It’s not that interesting to ask people where they go on holiday, says philosopher Ruud Welten. You’ll get a much more interesting conversation if you ask why they need to leave.
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