» Rainy day Holland

Today has been a great fun day.

If you like walking around in howling winds and rain, that is.

The rain was hanging around – Maria said it would be like this probably all week and it’s better we went to Amsterdam yesterday – so we had a slow breakfast which involved Maria running through all the Dutch foods we may have come across, differences between various countries – apparently you can tell a great deal about a country by the bread they eat; and also whether or not various things about Australia which people see on TV over here are actually representative.

“Yes, we tell everyone we have kangaroos as pets but really you don’t see them that often.”

Eventually she fished in the fridge for the famous Vla, a thick rich custard which usually comes off the supermarket shelf with two flavours in one carton, but not mixed. You squeeze it out and get chocolate on this side and vanilla on that side. Very tasty – not sure about custard for breakfast every day but today it felt right.

Then we found a near-by supermarket and bought some food for lunch, dinner, lunch tomorrow and train snacks for the trip to Karlsruhe tomorrow. It being a short distance back to the B&B we attempted to get away with one bag too few but about 3 metres out the front door of the supermarket the bag with 3 beer bottles and 2 fruit juice bottles gave birth on the pavement to an abomination. Luckily 4 of the 5 bottles thought ahead and used the other one as padding.

So we came out of it OK, with our 2 bottles of juice, only 2 of beer, and one messy pavement. It was sprinkling rain so we picked up all the glass and let nature take the beer back into the fold. Not that I was upset about losing beer or anything.

Cheese and bread and olives for lunch was just fine and then we headed out into the windy drizzle for an afternoon wander. We had a bit of an amble through the paddocks and down a grassy laneway, where Alice decided that one of the sheep in the paddock was her Arch-Nemesis because it looked at her for a while after she looked at it.

Anyway.

From there we went over the dunes to the beach where the wind was much stronger and really compressed the maximum amount of rain into your trousers. I took an umbrella for cover while I was using the camera, and until this point had relied on my assistant (Alice) to hold it in the right place. But on the beach the wind stuck the umbrella to my back while I was facing the other way. Look ma no hands.

After about 15 minutes on the beach we decided we’d had our adventure, and anyway getting soaked to the skin isn’t fun anymore after you are actually soaked, it’s just the getting there…

So we slogged on home, took off our wet gear, had a warm shower, then sat down to watch the Gene Wilder ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ on the computer. One marvellous sunset later – even though it was still raining – it was time to open the beer.

Can we stay a bit longer?

Greg