Blogs from Flevoland, Netherlands, Europe

This summer we go to Sweden! ☀️ We are planning our trip for a while now and it's time to share a little bit with you... It's gonna be a trip full of new experiences and new places. For a week we're going by canoe 🛶 Yesss, it's a 'back-to-basic' trip. We will travel by canoe from island to island through the Swedish nature. During this week we'll cook on a camping set, sleep in a tent and take our showers in the lake 🏕️ We will experience beautiful sunsets and sunrises, quiet nature without our mobile phones, maybe different weather conditions every hour 🌅 We have to put up the tent every day on a place of our own choice, prepare our breakfast and dinners on a small camping cooking set and experience the nature ... read more

What do you do to keep busy while you are waiting for deliveries that you need? We found plenty and then some! One thing we are realizing is that with having extra time we were able to do a few of the sewing projects that we had been putting off. As our sewing machine is quite heavy, takes up the large table in the cabin and also requires tearing apart the storage area to get the machine out in the first place, we don’t seem to get it out as often as we’d like. In other words, we don’t just “pop it out” for a quick sewing project. Between the rainy, windy days and the constant wait for packages to arrive we knew it was time for sewing. One thing about sewing on the boat is ... read more

The last village to visit this sailing season before hauling out for the winter is Urk. It is located on the IJsselmeer, the largest inland water in Western Europe. We had heard it was a very traditional village and a good place to stop for a few days. We found out quite a bit about the history of this area and why Urk has remained as traditional as it has for so long. In fact they have their own dialect of the Dutch language due to the fact that until 1939 Urk had been an island! The island was actually in the Almere Lake, but it became part of the Zuiderzee in the 13th century mainly due to the results of a large storm making this area actually tidal. In 1939 a dike was built from ... read more

When we left Amsterdam we headed toward Lelystad on the Ijsselmeer to have some repair work done on Tsamaya. The Ijsselmeer is the largest fresh water lake in the Netherlands and in fact of western Europe. It is a shallow lake that was the result of the construction of the 32 km. Afsluitdijk (dyke) in 1932. Before the closing of the dyke in 1932 the water here was salt water and was part of the North Sea called the Zuiderzee. In 1975 the Ijsselmeer was further divided by adding another dyke which created the Markermeer. Lelystad itself is located on an island that was created in the recent past. After WWII, work continued to reclaim land in this area and by 1950 a few construction islands had been created. Flevoland was one of these islands. By ... read more

De voorbereiding voor de reis zijn in volle gang. Alle apparaten worden opgeladen, de spullen die mee moeten liggen al uitgestald. Vanavond de rugzakken inpakken en dan kunnen we morgen rustig op weg. We hoeven pas rond een uur of half twee op Schiphol te zijn, dus we kunnen rustig aan doen. Morgen gaan we met de trein naar Schiphol, Henk en Ton brengen ons en onze loodzware rugzakken naar de trein! Spannend....... read more