Return To The Valley

It would be just the boys. A male bonding trip. A boy's day out. Just Kenzo and me.

Excited we left for the valley. The valley lies in the middle of a dune landscape at the West-coast. It holds a couple of small lakes, hidden out of sight by the sand dunes towering out above it. The highest of the surrounding dunes offer a fantastic view over the valley and the rest of the landscape.

We found it last year when we followed a narrow trail into the dunes, from where the heath fields and the forest met. The trail snakes through the rugged dune landscape to the beaches of the West-coast along the valley with its lakes. The view on some of the highest dunes was beautiful, and the path was one of our favorite options to reach the coastline.

That would be a great place. That would be our valley. Kenzo's valley. The valley I mentioned last week when I wrote about A Valley and A View, and how one of my dreams was to find a valley with Kenzo where we could enjoy the view and I could recite our silly adventures. I knew exactly which valley and view should be ours. This was that valley.

Kenzo was thrilled by the sight of the landscape. I sat down on a spot I thought would be a nice place to enjoy the view and listen to nature. The soft blowing of the wind, always present on the West-coast, carrying the rumbling of the North Sea waves breaking against the shoreline in the distance. "Wasn't it a great idea to return?" I said to Kenzo and continued with "Can you remember, the time we ...". Kenzo sad down beside me but was in no mood to listen to me. His face went back and forth between the view of the valley and me. He made small sighs.

"You want to scout the area?" I asked, while standing up, and Kenzo answered by making a little foal dance. There were no paths besides the one we just hiked but Kenzo soon found the scent of wildlife trails we could follow down into the valley. We followed the trails further, passed over some of the top ridges, sometimes as narrow as half a feet with a steep slope down on either side, making me wonder how hard the fall down would be if the sand under our feet would crumble. Kenzo went ever forward. He jumped into each lake we passed by. We spotted a flock of deer, who dashed as soon as they noticed us.

We only paused to make some pictures. Kenzo was anxious to continue. Ever eager of discovering what would lay behind the next ridge. It took us three hours before we arrived home again. Kenzo crashed, to process the views and scents one more time in dream world.

We visited the valley again in the evening, to chase sunsets. The valley didn't let us down.