Week 3 - Drouwenerveen, Bredevoort

by

Timothy Perrin

Drouwenerveen - August 17-18

Next were Chris and Dina in the tiny hamlet of Drouwenerveen (August 17-18). They took us for a long bike ride to Dina's secret swimming hole; even Chris didn't know where it was. The ride, however, was a bit too long for Terre's bum, which hadn't been on a bike seat in three years. Fortunately, it was a tandem and I was able to do most of the work for the last third of the trip and Terre could stand on the cross bar and relieve the weight off her bum. The peddles were set too long for Terre and she couldn't stand on the bumps so every one went straight to the bone. Ouch!

But what did happen was Terre realized that she loved riding a tandem and we've been shopping for one ever since. More on that later on.

Eelde - August 19-21

This was our first stay with Jan and Jitske in Eelde. I'll get to them in next week's summary.

Bredevoort - August 22-23

August 22-23, we stayed In Bredev0ort with a city councillor, Joop Wikkerink, and his wife, Dinie, a very talented photographer. Bredevoort is near the German border and a small medieval fortress. Their tourist schtick is bookstores, 27 in this tiny town, but most sell junk. A few are good, specializing in certain types of books.

Dinie's work is really extraordinary. She gave us some of her work and I had tears in my eyes. The only problem with staying with them was that Joop smoked as did their daughter. On the plus side, they had two nice cats.

There was another couple in the town, Henk and Renske, who had also wanted to host us and with whom we had dinner. Unfortunately, Henk smoked even more than Joop, so I'm glad we chose Joop and Dinie to stay with. We would have had a real problem with the smoke despite his best efforts to be courteous and to blow the smoke up into the air. We've been more careful about choosing non-smoking homes since then.

Renske's dinner was spectacular. A vegetarian feast built around the theme of orange in honor of the House of Orange, as in William of Orange, Orangemen, etc. That's the Dutch royal family.

Henk, by the way, runs one of the good bookstores in town with a marvelous collection of art and architecture books. It's small but the collection impressive.