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Category: Weekend trip

Weekend in Prague

Weekend in Prague

A weekend conference for DutchBoy meant I got to tag along and play tourist. We arrived late on Friday evening. Peaking out the hotel window, I was charmed by the old car parked outside a cocktail bar, expecting men with fedoras and machine guns to come running out. The next morning I wandered about with my camera, enjoying a new place and architecture and being alone in a crowd. Even in October, there were a lot of tourists, and facilities…

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Camping in Flevoland

Camping in Flevoland

We had gorgeous summer weather for the end of September, so headed off to Camping De Altena (one of the Natuurkampeerterreinen or natural campgrounds) for the weekend. There were only a few other campers on the site, which was spread over six big grass fields, each surrounded by forest. We arrived Saturday at lunch time and just basically ran around (at least the kids) for the rest of the afternoon. Then, after a leisurely morning, we packed up, moved the van…

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Lier, Antwerp, Herentals and Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, Oh My!

Lier, Antwerp, Herentals and Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, Oh My!

We headed for what may be our last weekend away without Sprocket before the little one comes. Sprocket was more than happy to spend time with Oma and Opa. We got caught in horrendous Friday afternoon rush hour traffic and the GPS, in an attempt to avoid one jam, routed me through most of the rest of the Netherlands, including two other jams it hadn’t known about. I left the Utrecht area at 3:30 or so and got to DutchBoy’s…

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Weekendje Weg

Weekendje Weg

How could we not take advantage of the grandparents’ willingness, even eagerness, to take Sprocket for a weekend, his first away from both of us, so we could have a weekend away together? This first time, we planned on just one night of separation to see how it went. I went down with Sprocket on Friday afternoon, in order to spend a little time trying to get the motorbikes going – after many delays and traffic, I didn’t have enough…

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Weekend in Limburg

Weekend in Limburg

Maastricht is commonly held to be one of the loveliest cities in the Netherlands, and Limburg is the only place with hills, so when Dutch Boy got a night in one of a chain of hotels as his Christmas gift from work (he actually got to choose out of a catalog), we knew where we wanted to go – Houthem, a small village two train stops from Maastricht. We reserved for Saturday night and then added Friday at the last…

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Christmas Markets in Cologne/Köln/Keulen

Christmas Markets in Cologne/Köln/Keulen

The mission: Christmas markets in Cologne (known in Dutch as Keulen and in German as Köln (and apparently in Spanish as Colonia – somehow my Google Maps started giving me Spanish names)). We left Sunday morning for the two hour drive to a park and ride on the outskirts of town where we took the metro into the city, a choice we patted ourselves on the back for once we saw the traffic downtown. Plus, I think we would have…

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Weekend in Zeeland

Weekend in Zeeland

Zeeland was the last Dutch province Sprocket and I hadn’t been to, so of course, that’s where we went for a weekend away. We spent the weekend in a little town, Breskens. We rented a bungalow (the Dutch use the word for vacation houses) in a bungalow park close to the beach. It was quite nice – two stories, a bedroom, big bathroom and living area on the ground floor and two bedrooms (and a sleeping closet) and another bathroom…

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Camping Trial

Camping Trial

We have plans to go on a camping trip for the last two weeks of August. Normally, no problem, but we weren’t sure how Sprocket would react to camping. I’d done some internet research and consensus seemed to be that babies slept better than ever in tents and they didn’t need a special bed, just to be cuddling with the parents. So we decided to try camping with our existing equipment, just to see how it went. Our trial trip…

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Travel for Travel’s Sake

Travel for Travel’s Sake

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. ~Robert Louis Stevenson OK, we’re perhaps a little bit crazy. The weekend before the baby’s due date we decided to rent a car and go on a trip. Where didn’t really matter, and in fact we had no destination in mind. We did pack the hospital bag and baby seat just in case. By the time Dutch Boy got home…

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Shakedown cruise shaken up

Shakedown cruise shaken up

A weekend with a zero percent chance of precipitation and no social plans seemed a perfect time to introduce DutchBoy to the joys of motorcycle touring before our trip to California. And to really test it we should also ride in the heat, which made a trip through the Okanagan make perfect sense. The plan was to ride to Oroville over the Hope-Princeton on Saturday, spend the night, and return through Winthrop, which is the number 1 Destination Highway in…

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Gabriola

Gabriola

A few years back I had the idea that my ex and I, my sister and her husband and my mother and stepfather should all buy a piece of property on Gabriola. I set it up, got the ‘rents in touch with a realtor, and we went as a group to look at properties. I had in mind a cheap piece of vacant land. At the end of the day, my mum and step-dad decided that they would buy a…

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Taking a Passenger

Taking a Passenger

Anyone who was reading my European travelogue closely might have noticed that I spent close to three weeks in the Netherlands with a Dutch guy I’d met in St. Petersburg. The more curious might have wondered if it was entirely platonic. Well, it wasn’t, but at the time we thought it was a vacation romance. However, as time went on, and after some drama, we came to believe that the connection we had was deeper than that. So, on July…

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