Hotel Restaurant Buitenlust

Wicker and wooden furniture, a boar's head over the fireplace, unfinished walls - Buitenlust clearly aims for the same homely outdoors atmosphere that much of the places geared towards tourism at the Veluwe have embraced. We're spending a long weekend in Hoenderloo, at the High Veluwe, a nature reserve in the east of the Netherlands, together with two good friends and their six months old daughter. Rihanna Gaga is loving it. Minutes after we arrived at the bungalow that we are renting for the weekend, we spotted a squirrel hopping along the trees. And the six months old baby is proving an interested audience for anything she does, inciting her to perform complete sing and dance shows for the little one. The High Veluwe is a beautiful environment, with its heaths, sandy planes and woods and all in all, the bungalow comes with a private sauna and the park in which it is located has a swimming pool, restaurant, and enormous playgrounds. It's probably very close to a preschooler's idea of heaven and for the adults it's immensely relaxing, too.

We're stopping at Buitenlust for lunch, before we will explore the national park of the High Veluwe. As she has been throughout the weekend, Rihanna Gaga is mostly focused on the baby, although the fact that we saw a little grey mouse running around on our way here was quite exciting, too. As usual, she wants a chocolate milk (at a restaurant, she always either orders that or apple juice). We don't order lunch for her separately, but let her eat along with us. I'm taking the set lunch, which includes a small soup, a large bread roll with different coverings, including a kroket. Others in our company opt for smoked eel and French cheese. Among all of that, there's plenty for Rihanna Gaga to snoop from our plates, although the kroket is a clear favourite: she eats about half of mine.

Even though Buitenlust is along quite a busy street, its location in the woods and close to the national park gives it a very rural atmosphere. The other patrons include a group of cyclists and elderly couples on a day out. The waiters work quick and precise - tourism is a main source of income for this area and there's lots of places like this around here, so professionalism is high among staff and the competition seems to have ensured a good quality among all the places that we visit this weekend.

Rihanna Gaga loves nature. She hasn't always. I remember very well how, when she was a young baby, she preferred the liveliness of the city over woods or dunes. But now she loves checking out nature, picking up branches and leaves and stones, collecting pine cones and flowers. There's already quite a pile of all of this around our bungalow, and since were headed for the national park after lunch, I'm quite sure we'll add some more to that today.