In The Beginning

We are away!

The one thing worse than packing in a rush is having an unlimited period of time to pack! ...

It was good with 3 weeks to go to get the bikes serviced , and with ten days to go it felt ok to make a pile of stuff in the spare room. Then it got hard and I started to lose the will to live. What is in the pile of cycling clothes? How many gloves are in the 'mountain' bag? Where did I carefully put the passports?  Stress and confusion for all.

But now we are away in Holland and it was all worth while.

With all the stress of packing we have not spend much time actually planning what we would do on the continent. There was one fixed point , meeting up with all the family in Argentiere in July, but we were free to be flexible and go wherever we wanted for rest of the time.

So that is what we are doing. We flexibly changed our pseudo-plan of finishing our holiday with a cycle trip to the Frisian islands and are now starting with it. Today was a practice ride around the dunes near Bergen and it was a great success. The bikes worked well, we did not get lost , and the arguments were kept to an acceptable level as they were only about trivial things, and I always had the last words. ( which were 'Yes dear' without an exclamation mark I might add).

The weather is wild and windy with some big wave.

And the cycling was through spectacular dunes and forests

Off for a beer and some food ... then to Texel tomorrow and hope the 40km/hr wind drop a bit. Still it is not raining much.