Yesterday we took the cats out for some fresh air. We bought harnesses and leashes for them. They will have to wear the harness during our upcoming flight so we thought to try and get them used to wearing them.
Today we have finally set a date for our big move to America. We bought our plane tickets today and will fly from Amsterdam to Chicago with our two cats Arby and Alex on Sunday 21 September. This means we have only 85 days left from today to arrange a lot of stuff, get rid of a lot of stuff, and move all the stuff that’s left. We’re going to have a busy three months!
Three years ago today, on 19 June 2005, we had a great day in Italy on our city trip to Napels. In the morning we took a bus from Napels to the foot of Vesuvius and in the afternoon we visited the ruined and partially buried Roman city of Pompeii nearby. Here are few photos of our visit to Europe’s most famous volcano.
Ever since I moved to the Netherlands to live with Arthur in May 1999, it has always been our plan to move to the U.S. ‘someday’. In late 2006 we finally made the decision that we would move in early 2009. At that time the plan was to start looking into the process in early 2008. In mid-2007 we decided to move up our plans by several months and by the end of 2007 we decided we would try to move as soon as possible. In order to move we would have two major tasks: applying for Arthur’s immigrant visa, and selling our home in Leiden. More »
I’ve updated and finalised our 2007 Year Book in our online Photo Album. Highlights of the year were our visit to The Gambia in January, where we saw 177 different species of birds, our holiday in the south of Spain, where we explored Andalusia and a part of Portugal, and our diving trip to Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, where we had some wonderful dives in the Red Sea.
Last weekend was our annual family weekend and this time we had rented a large house in Neede in the east of the Netherlands. We had a great time. On Saturday we drove to Eibergen where we did a boat tour (see our route) on an authentic Berkelzomp. Here’s a photo of my family on the boat, taken by the friendly captain Hugo.
Amateur filmmaker Patrick de Wolf won the second prize yesterday at the TAS theme festival in Tilburg, with his film “Haunted House”. The genre of this year’s Dutch short film contest in Noord Brabant was ‘spanning’ (‘thriller’). More »
Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »
First, thank you very much for leaving the severed chain lock on the rack where I parked my bike yesterday afternoon at the metro station. Seeing the lock this morning surely saved me at least a half hour of paranoid searching and re-searching, mumbling to myself and figuring I had gone mad, not remembering just where I had parked my bike. But I know that I did indeed park my bike where I thought I did, it just wasn’t there this morning. But my shiny red lock was. So thank you. More »
We went to The Gambia for 11 days earlier this month, and saw about 150 birds, 134 of which we managed to photograph. They have now all been added to our online lifelist. More »