Yesterday at 8:00 PM • Modified yesterday at 10:38 PM
For Cor van Doorn (70), the BillyBird Hemelrijk recreational park in Volkel feels a bit like his backyard. Or rather: his private swimming pool. After all, the park is mainly a recreational lake with a number of attractions surrounding it. He has had a subscription since it opened forty years ago. At first he came there alone, later with his children and now he walks around with his grandchildren. “I think I can rightly be called Mister Hemelrijk.”
Cor is clearly enjoying himself this day as he walks through the park and along the water. “I have been coming here since the beginning. I got married in 1981 and came to live in Volkel. A few years later the recreational lake opened and I have been coming here very often since then,” he says with a smile on his face. “It feels familiar here and I have made a lot of memories there.”
One of his fondest memories comes from the park’s early years. Cor often went surfing on the lake. He has never been a good surfer, he says. But he was a go-getter: “One day I had to fight quite a bit to get to the other side due to a strong wind, but I finally succeeded. I was quite proud then.”
“Surfing was indeed very popular at that time,” park owner Gerrie Derks remembers. Together with her husband, she started the ‘great adventure’ in 1986 to turn a former sand quarry into a recreational area. “That of course became a beach bath.”
“We started with a fence,” she recalls of the park’s inception. “Then we bought a very old caravan. That was the reception. And we bought a few very old classrooms. That became the first catering industry where visitors could buy an ice cream, drink or snack.”
In the first year, Hemelrijk had 350 season ticket holders. “That was already above expectations,” says Derks. Over the years, the recreational lake grew into a recreational park with indoor and outdoor playgrounds, water slides and a roller coaster: “We now have a hundred thousand people with a subscription.”
And Cor is perhaps the most loyal visitor. In some years he came to Hemelrijk more than a hundred times. “There have been years when I have been here 115 times. I often go for a swim. To relax and de-stress,” he says as a self-proclaimed Mister Heavenly.
But Hemelrijk did not only remain a beloved place for Cor himself. Over the years it also became a place for his family. In the 1990s, Cor took his children to the lake where he loved to visit, now he walks around there with his nine grandchildren. “The pirates’ country is their favorite. Enjoy climbing, scrambling and going down the big slide. I like to do that with them.”
And it is precisely the pleasure he gets from a visit to the park that gives the owner satisfaction. “I am proud of what my husband and I have built. The best thing is that so many people, from young to old, can have fun here,” she says. And the future? “We are looking forward to this with four children who will continue the adventure.”
