Running a business on an island: free fun and stress

Running a business is a top-level sport, but running a business on an island? That is a top-level sport with an obstacle course of ebb, flood and logistical puzzles. And you get a few ‘fun factors’ thrown in for free.

Take our new mattresses. Because we needed them quickly, we ordered them online. At 07:00 in the morning the phone rang. A desperate driver from the Randstad: “I’m standing in front of a huge body of water and I can’t go any further!” That’s right, Ameland is an island; we’re still working on the drawbridge, but for now the boat is the only option. The poor man had no idea what had hit him.

And then there were our fifty new breakfast chairs. According to the supplier they had been delivered without a hitch, but our yard was emptier than the beach in November. What had happened? The carrier had lumped all the Wadden Islands together. “Oops, we accidentally dropped them off at a big customer on Terschelling.” After a scenic tour via Harlingen and Holwerd, the chairs finally came ‘home’, just before the Easter rush.

These days we are also a kind of unofficial travel agency. When an enthusiastic last-minute booking comes in late in the evening, we always give the guests a quick call: “How lovely that you’re coming, but are you already on the island? Because the last boat has already left.” Sometimes there is a short silence on the other end of the line, followed by a deep sigh and a cancellation. Geography really is a subject of its own.

Less ‘fun’: the forgotten car key. It happens more often than you would think. Our guests are already enjoying the sea breeze on the ferry while their car key is still dozing safely in the kitchen drawer or on the bedside table. As soon as our cleaners report the ‘find of the day’, the race against the clock begins. We dash to the harbour to send the key along on the next boat.

And then there are the ‘island babies’. When a heavily pregnant guest checks in, we sleep a little more lightly too. More than once we have seen parents-to-be fleeing to ‘the mainland’ on the first morning boat. Sometimes the helicopter or the lifeboat is even needed. A brand-new father once called us full of apologies: the apartment had not been left tidy, and we were welcome to the contents of the fridge as a consolation.

In the past, by the way, a birth on the Wadden Sea was an administrative nightmare; because the sea did not belong to any Frisian municipality, the father had to travel all the way to The Hague to register the birth. Fortunately this is better arranged nowadays, although a birth between the sandbanks remains the ultimate Ameland souvenir.

Every now and then someone calls for a dyke or a tunnel to Ameland. That would make all these situations a lot easier, that’s true. But let’s please not do it. Ameland is the ‘Wadden diamond’ precisely because we are surrounded by sand and sea. We will happily put up with a few missing chairs and stranded drivers.

Do you know that lovely programme ‘Hello Goodbye’? Joris Linssen talks to people at Schiphol who are waiting for their loved ones. It produces moving and sometimes funny stories. I have the privilege of experiencing that every day at our holiday business on Ameland. People often ask: isn't working in hospitality incredibly hard, how do you keep it up? The answer is simple: meeting people from every corner of the Netherlands and beyond gives so much joy and insight beyond your own ‘bubble’. From Amsterdam hippies and down-to-earth Groningen farmers to posh types from the Gooi. All with their own stories, assumptions and wishes. “We have breakfast included, but do you also provide breakfast for our dog? Because that's what we assumed.” It's wonderful to come up with a fitting answer to questions like that and still keep things pleasant… And the nice thing is that everyone is in a holiday mood rather than a funeral mood.

Some are clearly fans of the TV programme Bed & Breakfast and really think along about how everything could be even better. As soon as the new season starts on TV, the number of lists with well-meant advice rises dramatically. At check-out, people arrive with an arsenal of handwritten notes on what, in their view, really needs to change: “We missed a lemon squeezer”. Aha… seriously? Yes, dead serious. Curious, I take in every list. Sometimes chuckling inwardly at what people come up with. Very kind, but wouldn't you rather have gone to the beach while you were here on the island?

But welcoming regular guests who come year after year is also a source of happiness. Dorothee, for example, has been holidaying at our family business for decades. For 40 years she has traditionally brought delicious German chocolate biscuits. That's why, as a toddler, my husband already looked forward to her arrival. He is now 45, but that doesn't spoil the fun. She helps our sons with their German homework and walks our dog when we're busy on a changeover day.

So some regular guests really feel like family. You see their children grow up, and when they start families of their own, they come to the same holiday address too. That feels truly rich, doesn't it?! We share in their lives, because everyone's life has ‘Good Times, Bad Times’, to throw in yet another programme. For example, couples who came together for years and then suddenly check in alone, because divorce or death means they have to carry on on their own. Of course tears flow at reception then, and we make an extra effort to make it a meaningful time on Ameland! So for the business owners on the island, the tourist is not only a source of income but also a ‘happiness machine’ that enriches our lives. At least it is for me.

Spot the 10 differences…

“You live on Ameland and you’re seriously going to another Wadden island for your only holiday that year?” Absolutely! Not because we’re afraid of discovering another continent, but precisely because we’re very curious about the other parts of the Wadden Sea World Heritage Site.  We visited five German islands and the difference turned out to be quite a lot bigger than just a different lighthouse.

As people in our forties, for instance, we felt really young on Norderney! Mobility scooters and rollators were parked outside almost every ‘coffee & cake café’. The German Wadden islands are popular with older people, who go there to ‘take a cure’. Health insurers invest heavily to let patients recover in the healthy sea air. But to be honest, the food there is a little less healthy.

We felt slim there; the other visitors turned out to be true bon vivants. Chips and fried sausage were ‘the standard’ almost everywhere, and salt is used like icing sugar, not sparingly, let’s say. But hold on tight to your tray of chips on the island of Helgoland, because… there is a 50 euro fine if the seabirds snatch your tray and everything ends up on the street!

The cultural differences were amusing and are a reason in themselves to visit the islands of our Eastern neighbours. Whereas in the Netherlands we would simply give a guest a paracetamol, that is a real ‘no-go’ at a restaurant on Langeoog. The employee handled it neatly by the book: “We are not allowed to provide medicines; for that you need to go to the pharmacy.” That is of course the right route, but we ‘Hollanders’ did need a moment to adjust to these formal answers. Clearly everything has been thought through. You only need to follow all the warning signs and you’re safe.

The signs are impossible to miss, too, because they feature clear pictograms of people drowning or falling near a bridge or beach. Often made even clearer with text in bold letters, exclamation marks, bright colours and, of course, the necessary repeat signs every so many metres. Back on Ameland you can’t help thinking: am I actually safe here? Who is thinking along with me about where I should walk or what I can and can’t do? We could understand the East Frisians reasonably well; in writing, too, the language resembles Frisian. But did you know that my 2-metre-tall son got stuck in almost every door frame, bed and bathroom on the East Frisian coast? The people of the region so close by here turn out not to be nearly as tall as the Frisians and the people of Groningen!

I won’t give away any more surprising differences, but I recommend everyone to take a look further along the Wadden area too. You really don’t have to fly to Brazil to experience fun cultural differences! And those exuberant exclamation marks to add emphasis, I happily brought home with me: we’re keeping those (!).

You only know what you have once you have to do without it… Recently I found out that this also applies to being able to smell and taste. Those senses are, you see, ‘a bit broken’. To illustrate: “Surely you can smell for yourself that the previous guests smoked in the apartment?” Well no, no idea… “You’re letting the croissants for our breakfast burn in the oven. Can’t you smell them? They were done ages ago!” Sadly not, no. From now on I’ll just set the timer. 

Like so many people, as a result of long COVID my sense of smell and taste has gone haywire. For well over a year and a half now I have experienced everything around me differently, because two senses no longer work normally. You get used to it, but it sometimes leads to strange situations. Where I used to love breathing in the sea air, the Wadden Sea now seems like a picture on a TV screen because something is missing. Or what about the cheerful scent of rose hips in De Vleijen in summer? The flowering butterfly bushes in the village, or the distinctive smell of mud from the seabed at low tide? You are missing a dimension, and that is a process of grieving. It almost sounds like a sad column, but that is not how it is meant. On the contrary, the intention is to make you aware of the scents and tastes of the island and the Wadden Sea. Because they are truly special. Enjoy them all the more this holiday! 

By the way, I miss my sense of smell more on Ameland than in the city. You only really notice that loss if you put a clothes peg on your nose for a day and smell nothing at all. But I wouldn’t recommend it. A waste of your day. Instead, enjoy everything around you all the more. Even if there are some smells you might rather do without. That is one advantage long COVID patients do have. No idea in which tent someone is smoking weed, no bother from pungent barbecue smells, a smelly toilet block or overflowing bins at the campsite. Every disadvantage has its advantage, as a famous football coach might have said. 

As for taste: do let yourself be surprised by the flavourful local products that Amelands Produkt has to offer. Experiencing food is also completely different for the group of people who are left with this nasty sensory complaint. To me, tomato tastes of chlorine and most flavours are dulled, so you end up adding loads of salt, fat and sugar. I’ve gone up a clothing size in the meantime, but never mind. The island of course has wonderfully healthy and tasty products for you. There are plenty of restaurants to try them. Or go to the organic farm, the trout farm or the Hollum mill to buy these artisanal products and cook yourself a delicious meal. And should you also belong to the group who, for whatever reason, have no sense of taste or smell… then enjoy the texture and colour of the food. That works too, I know from experience. However you look at it, smell it, hear it, feel it and taste it, I wish everyone an impressive stay on Ameland!

“To one person it’s just like Schiphol, to another a children’s fairy tale…"

“Look, there’s the pilot of the boat!”, I hear a grown woman say as the ferry docks. “He’s also wearing one of those white shirts with stripes on the shoulders, just like at KLM.” The lady is probably enjoying a man in uniform, but normally you would call him the captain or skipper… On that same crossing, a fellow passenger wonders what those big green and red floats in a long row in the sea are doing there. Now I can’t hold back. I explain that they are buoys. That they mark the waterway and that the ferry sails between them, so that we don’t run aground at sea, because it isn’t equally deep everywhere. The man looks at me as if I’ve told him the sea is on fire. We arrive in Nes and the man from before says: “The pont is here”. When I think of a pont, I picture a small boat that helps you cross a river or canal, but this man apparently sees it differently. I can’t resist a quick Google and see that the definition of pont is indeed very broad. A ferry that covers long distances and carries cars can also be called a pont. Learned something new again.

Ebb and flood is another thing that can cause confusion. My father-in-law, Wadden skipper Theo Mosterman, always had a lovely fairy-tale story about the tides on his boat trips, one that I actually wanted to believe myself. He addressed the guests through the microphone and said: “Do you see that the seawater we saw this morning is now almost completely gone? We are now looking at the bottom of the sea. Let me tell you how that happened. When we left this morning, there was a little boy on the jetty selling buckets of seawater. He has evidently done good business, because the sea is almost empty!”

The Wadden, we all experience it in our own way. For many islanders, ebb and flood is in their blood. For some tourists it may be more like a theme park ride or a completely new travel experience full of nautical terms they have no idea about. But what does it matter, call it what you like and enjoy it!

Froukje Mosterman-de Groot, June 2022

“Mem, didn’t you buy strawberries and nice toppings for our breakfast? But the fridge is empty now. There are no eggs left either, and where has the fresh bread gone?” My other son already has that doubtful look on his face that says ‘here we go again’: last-minute arrivals who have added breakfast to their booking. So we are out of luck again and eat crackers with peanut butter.

A familiar scene for Ameland holiday entrepreneurs; we do our very best to make our guests happy. Sometimes that goes quite far. But of course there are limits. The man who asked whether I could personally deliver breakfast in bed, I had to disappoint. Maybe during the rugby weekend I would have hesitated for a moment (only in my thoughts, that is). Our breakfast room is close by, just come over there.

Anyway, the business is really ‘our third child’, which sometimes seems to come first and almost always seems to get its way. For instance, at our house the coats have recently been landing on the floor again instead of hanging neatly on the coat racks. Too few had been delivered for the apartments, so: unscrew ours and hang them up in the apartments. Because of the busy season it may take months before a new one is hung in our house. If ever. Fortunately the holes in the walls remind me to buy new ones.

Luckily for me, my husband and the boys don’t even notice when our own new coffee table has been swapped for a damaged one with wine stains and dried-on nail polish. They don’t use coasters themselves either, so it doesn’t keep them awake. That meagre breakfast does bother them, though.

To keep the reviews on the booking sites good, we live in a kind of second-hand-shop-furnished house. Right now there are also three lamps and four vacuum cleaners in the living room that have ‘something wrong with them’ and therefore had to be taken off ‘the front line’. Because of the coronavirus measures, the distribution of many goods had become very unreliable. Delivery times for furniture, machines, bedding: it is Russian roulette when it comes to Ameland. It gave me sleepless nights, because the new apartments were already booked for the following weekend, but the toppers to go on the beds had not been delivered. What do you do then? Disappoint the guests and cancel their weekend away? You have probably guessed it already… I didn’t sleep any better the week after, but the guests did, because my soft new toppers were dragged out of the house and put on the guests’ mattresses to guarantee their sleeping comfort.

That really went too far, my husband thought: lying awake yourself as a poor sleeper, so that the guests can have your topper! Oh well, after such a good night at least they don’t need breakfast in bed, and they have plenty of energy to walk to the breakfast room, that’s how you have to look at it.

Froukje Mosterman-de Groot 

When you get to write this column in December, it makes sense to look back on the past year. As a holiday business owner on Ameland, I found it a turbulent year. Waves of cancellations followed every press conference. And the gaps left by our German neighbours staying away were soon filled again by Dutch guests. Some of these Dutch visitors were setting foot on a Wadden island for the very first time. In the past they would have chosen Mallorca or Ibiza. This year, Ameland was their Ibiza of the Netherlands.

This group of tourists, mostly city dwellers, sometimes needed a little time to get used to Ameland's rural character. One bewildered guest anxiously asked me: “Aren't you afraid the courtyard garden will be crowded with homeless people at night? They're bound to sleep on those soft lounge sofas, because there's no lockable gate around the buildings at all!?!” Takes some getting used to, then. This summer, too, a family from Rotterdam was still sitting relaxed at their holiday accommodation 15 minutes before the last evening ferry left. All the apartments were fully booked and I knew they had checked out that morning to go home. So I quickly called a taxi so they could still catch the boat. 'Oh, never mind, madam, we'll just take the next one!' No, the ferry is not a metro that keeps coming and going. It's high season and the whole island is fully booked, so the only place left to spend the night is that soft lounge sofa (meant for that non-existent homeless person) in the courtyard garden. I also remember the family who went home 2 days early because they had made a discovery… they stood disappointed at reception and asked: “Is there really no McDonald’s on Ameland? Then our kids don't want to stay here a whole week!” I pointed them to the delicious (also deep-fried) kibbeling at our fish shop in Nes, but it was no use. They left for the mainland, despite the beautiful weather. Some guests even had trouble reaching Ameland at all… I could barely keep a straight face, but I also felt a bit sorry for them when I got a call with the following question: “We're not coming today because we're queuing in Harlingen, but there's no ferry to Ameland leaving from here?”
But back to that journey home, which was quite a thing for our 'Ibiza-goers' too. A lady stands pensively next to her rental bike, beside at least 20 bags full of new clothes and other nice purchases from Ameland. “Could you return the rental bike for us and call a taxi to the ferry, because we've bought far too much and don't dare to cycle like this!” Of course, we'll sort it out. What I found harder to sort out was the departed guest who called with the question: “We're back in Holwerd now but we can't see our luggage anywhere, and the bike rental man said it would all be fine...!” No sir, you should have put it on the ferry yourself. “What do you mean? When I fly to my holiday destination they make sure the luggage gets on board too, don't they?!” Well, it took some getting used to for guests and islanders alike. The all-inclusive guests of the Mediterranean resorts had now found us and expected service, service, service from the holiday business owner… “Would you look after our dog and baby tonight so we can go out?” and “Do you have a dog we can borrow for the beach?” I saw a business model here: match it with the babysitting request from the other guests, and you can even borrow a baby along with the dog.

I'm sure some of these guests will return to Ameland, because they have discovered how much natural beauty we have to offer. How lovely was the moment this summer when the girl from Rotterdam said: “Wow! How special, we'd never seen a real butterfly before!” And how she enjoyed the strawberries and raspberries in our courtyard garden, although at first she wasn't quite sure they weren't plastic. “Is that fruit in the garden here really edible?”
Welcome to our world, city folk from the Randstad. I'm joining the Liefde voor Ameland campaign, and let's assume that in 2022 we can all enjoy the peace, space and nature together. Because Ameland is exceptionally beautiful, even without a McDonald’s.

Froukje Mosterman-de Groot