SHORELINES : Dutch Retreat : Nearly four dozen tourists from Holland rest up under gray skies in Ventura after a 16-day blitzkrieg visit around the West.

Around the pool of the Ventura Holiday Inn, a dozen tourists dozed and dawdled. This was on the second Tuesday in June, and sky and sea were dead gray.

“It’s quiet, and the sea is nice,” observed Ganny Zwaan, a motherly woman who lay tanless on a chaise longue. “But not enough sun.”

Half a million weather-wise Ventura County residents could have warned her about that, but Zwaan and her traveling companions had an excuse.

They were from Holland. There were almost four dozen of them altogether, from 45 to 82 years old. They were at the groggy end of a blitzkrieg 16-day American tour. Their guide, an old hand in the Holy Land, was leading his first trip to America. And they were in Ventura mainly because it was on the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles International Airport.

Thousands of visitors from far-flung lands dash through this area this way every summer. What do they think?

“We know that they’re very interested in the ocean, and they like the promenade (along the shoreline in Ventura) because they can walk along the beach,” said Carol Lavender, director of sales for the Ventura Visitors and Convention Bureau.

Between June 1 and Sept. 30 of 1990, Lavender said, hotels in the city of Ventura reported visits from 80 tour groups, about a third of them international. Germany, Japan and Taiwan seem to send the most tourists, she said.

On their day here, the Dutch at the Holiday Inn did more or less what Lavender predicted: They wandered along the shore, two of them daring to test the waters of the Pacific. (It was cold, and there was kelp in it.) They walked to the mission, or sampled an American lunch at Carrows or shopped along Main Street.

“The USA has a lot of good and nice things,” said tour guide Pieter De Vries, a 68-year-old retired minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

“But one thing you don’t have is nice cities. San Francisco--that’s a little bit like a Dutch city. Dutch cities are cozy. And Ventura is like that. It has a center. L.A. is awful.”

The American tour operators had tried to sell De Vries on three days in Ventura, he said, but he countered that “one is enough. There are better beaches.”

De Vries has for decades been leading international tours, usually through the lands of the Bible. He only decided to visit the United States when the Persian Gulf War put the Holy Land off-limits.

“It’s a tryout,” De Vries said.

Los Angeles was the first stop. For 16 days since then, they had been dashing from Disneyland to Phoenix to Tucson to the Grand Canyon to Brian Head, Utah, to Las Vegas to Zion National Park to San Francisco. De Vries won $20 in Las Vegas, was staggered by the number of homeless in San Francisco, had a nice night of prayer and song with Protestants in Pasadena.

The next morning at 4:30, the Dutch delegation would board a bus for LAX. It was a daunting prospect: after 16 days on the road in a party of 46, another full day of air travel, via Atlanta and Amsterdam.

But for the next few hours before dinner, there was Ventura, the pool, the sea. De Vries headed off for a walk with his wife. Around the pool, the dozing and dawdling continued.

“It’s a pity,” said Franz Szpak, appraising the gray skies as he nursed a Budweiser and gazed out over the poolside furniture. “But it is good to have some rest.”

* THE PREMISE

The summer of 1991 begins June 21 and ends Sept. 23. Shorelines, a twice-monthly column, aims to catch details of the season.