Schoterbos parkrun, Haarlem
Schoterbos is in North Haarlem. The course is a very natural, hard-to-get-lost, loop round the edge of the park, on a 1300m route marked for running. That isn't the original course, which takes in the middle of the park as well as the outside, to make a two-lapper, but there are extensive renovations going on at the moment in the park which necessitate the simpler course.
There's free parking at the tennis club to the South, which is also used to store the equipment, and for coffee etc. after the event. Spotting me poking around, a gentleman came out of the club to see if he could help, and was very welcoming, pointing me to the toilets in the tennis club, and explaining that there's currently no cut-through from the club to the park, so I should go round the edge (which is only a few hundred metres). I parked in the street outside, which was about as easy as it could be - not always the case in The Netherlands, with some towns full of paid-parking. It helps that this is a little distance from the centre.
Other than the occasional walker, there is barely an impediment on the course, certainly no hill or even a bump. I ran this, walked into town and back and still had barely covered any vertical distance. While I was in Northern Ireland, I kept being surprised by courses that felt hilly and yet only have 20m or so of ascent. This course had 1m, and that shows the difference between a flat course and one that is a 'bit hilly' - 20m isn't much, but 1m is as near to nothing as you are going to get.
It's tarmacced all the way round except for a chicane in the middle, caused by the renovations. They put the world's most energetic marshal there to give everyone a lift. He's also a prolific plogger (picking up litter on the go), @wayeoflife on Instagram/Facebook - have a look to get an idea of some of the energy he transmits.
This was event 11, having started in August 2021, and it's a very slick event. Even with only 32 finishers, we had a new course record at the front, followed in by Dutch, South African, Australian and British runners.
Despite missing out on the sights of the middle of the park, with other people exercising, lakes and more trees, it's a pretty enough route, with plenty of tall trees looming over the side of the path.
Afterwards I sat in the tennis club with fellow runners for a couple of hours, and a group of us headed into town to eat, which gave me my first experience of having my vaccination certificate scanned - very simply, now they recognise British ones, and I just called it up on the NHS app and people used their phones to scan it in.
It's a little further into town than we'd thought, a good couple of miles to the heart of Haarlem. Not that we particularly noticed, chatting about everything and anything, but one of our number was on a tight timescale and had to miss lunch. Apart from that, everything was spot on: the event was easy to find, the place welcoming and the town very pretty.