Blogs from Lelystad, Flevoland, Netherlands, Europe

Today was a travel day to get us from Paris to Lelystad, The Netherlands. While I don't love France as a country (largely in part because of the rude treatment of Americans I have experienced) it is a beautiful country to drive through. There are the canola fields and beautiful farmland. I try to take as may pictures out the window of the bus as possible. After a comfort stop (bathroom break), we stopped at Antwerp, Belgium. Now there's a city in which I could spend more time! Once we took a quick tour of the city we had free time for lunch, shopping or both. Belgium is famous for the French fry. The story goes that some soldiers had fried potatoes lengths in Belgium but thought they were in France (French is one of the ... read more

May 8 – May 18, 2016 It is hard to believe but in a couple of days it will have been 3 weeks since we left the US for the Netherlands. We stayed on Tsamaya “on the hard” for 6 nights and then got launched on Tuesday, May 10th. Everything went without a hitch which is always a good thing. Irwin, the crane operator here at Flevo Marina does an excellent job – we had him launch us before and were always impressed with how smooth an operation he has. Instead of moving to a regular slip in the marina we had to stay near the crane as they were doing some minor fiberglass work on our stern and it wasn’t quite finished when we were launched. They were to fix it while we were gone ... read more

Where are we now?? We know it has been quite some time since our last blog entry, but we have been doing some traveling since the Channel Islands and haven’t had time to stop to get a blog entry written and posted. We have been definitely taking plenty of photos, seeing as much as we can, meeting lots of nice people and been in a few countries since we last wrote. In many instances we were spending the days sailing from one port to another, staying overnight and then moving on the next day to get closer to our goal of the Netherlands. Other times we decided to stay a couple of nights to have a chance to see something in the area or to wait for a better weather window. We still had to watch ... read more

We have been in the Netherlands for 3 days:) We arrived on the 19th at about 12:50pm. I was dead tired. I wasnt really able to sleep on the plane but Matt slept pretty much the whole time. Our first flight flew from Seatac to Reykjavík Iceland. It was 8 hours long and to top it off we didnt get a free in flight meal. We had to pay for it. I got a chicken ceaser salad that was tiny and it cost 5euro and Matt go a ham and cheese sandwich that had jelly on it. It seemed pretty weird but tasted really good oddly enough. His cost 4euro. When we arrived in Iceland we had an hour layover which was not very long. Our plane was actually beginning to board like 30 minutes after ... read more

Almere Haven, Flevo Polder, 02-08-2001. For the last two days I have been in a haze, cycling well beyond 200 kilometers a day on sandy tracks, wild paths in the forest, along tranquil canals and forest streams, across rugged hills and gliding across the German/Dutch border pas de problem despite my vagabond appaerance, despite the wild eyed-look in my face looking back at me from the mirror of a bathroom in the very first restaurant I found once back on Dutch soil, the face of a man possessed... possessed by the sharp claws of society, paying my rent and keeping my job...ah yeah, paying my taxes of course!!! Possessed my Nong's guiding voice that brought me back from mental instability induced by nearly four weeks of marijuana-free excistence after months of a daily plant induced high, ... read more