From: Rainer Subject: Fwd: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 10 Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 03:07:40 EDT Dear Family and Friends, Here's the last of the catch-up installments so far. You now should have everything that I''ve written. More will come later. Cheers, Rainer Saturday, 10/3 The cold weather continues. Email from Dietrich indicates that Portland is undergoing a similar change. There was also some email from several other recipients of the "journal" that I'd sent -- all quite complimentary. I guess I should send the follow ups soon. I was trying to upload photos today, when I bumped into AOL's FTP problems -- they only allow you to up load one file at time -- that's not acceptable. I toyed with some downloaded FTP client shareware that should fix this problem, but it can't seem to find either the Eagle ftp server or my own internet provider. I'll have to try getting IP addresses tomorrow and try again. We did go birding this morning in one of the nearby woods. It's very pretty there, even though it was pretty cold. We saw the Bar-headed Goose, a Barnacle Goose, and the European Jay as new species. There was a much better look at a Great Crested Grebe. After lunch Vera and I drove back to the cemetery. The downloaded photos we took earlier didn't show the inscription clearly. The water we used to rinse the stone reflected too much light. We found the spot quickly. The stone had dried. We'd taken along a tooth brush from the Air France survival kit to brush out the incised letters. Doing so let us to just the opposite, filling the incised letters with the dried sandy soil making for much better contrast between the inscription and the dark stone. So we ended up rubbing dried sand all over and then brushing just that off, being careful to leave the sand in the letters undisturbed. It as the opposite of grave stone rubbing -- still ending up with a negative image. The pictures turned out much better. We stopped at a little grocery store around the corner from the hotel to pick up some hot chocolate, red wine, and beer. We then proceeded to the Dunes. We saw several roads on the map, and tried to find a way in. Most of the roads turned out to be bike paths (fietspod). At the end of one street was a small barricade, like at a railroad crossing. The sign said (in my best attempt to decipher Dutch) to drive up to raise the barricade. So, I drove up, and the barricade raised. Against protests from my passengers I drove through and followed the road to the end where there were 3 parking spaces for visitors to the water pumping station (bazookers). We were visitors, so I parked. No where did I see anything that said I shouldn't be here or shouldn't park here. We started out walk. The trails through the dunes are quite interesting. The widest part of the trail is paved brick for bicycles. The pattern is a diagonal, herring-bone one which lets the wheels never get caught in any brick grooves. To one side of the bike path is a sandy equestrian trail. To the other side of the bike path is a gravel walk way. Each of the seconds of the trails is separated from the other with a narrow grass segment. Quite complex. Very nice. We walked a couple of kilometers, spotted a Common Pheasant in the distance, but pretty much only saw magpies, jackdaws, and gulls. The dunes were covered with a lot of brush and shrubbery that is quite dense. It's all very pretty, but the birding was lousy. We took a side path to the tops of the dunes and saw the beach. There were old WWII bunkers to the left and to the right facing the sea. We walked back to the car. Along the way my family kidded me about my concern for getting the car towed away from the street around the hotel for illegal parking. They were saying that the car would probably be gone. It wasn't. There was a little yellow piece of paper under the windshield wiper, however. We couldn't read all the Dutch. We could decipher the 60 guilder part. I'll visit the police station tomorrow to figure out what I did wrong and probably to pay the 60 guilders. Fine. For dinner we'd planned to have a rice table (literally translated from the Dutch). Monika wasn't to keen on the idea, but put up with it since New York Pizza was just around the corner from the Indonesian restaurant and new that we'd probably end up there for her food. The rice table, if you don't know, is a huge collection of food -- we counted 21 different dishes on the table. Everything from shrimp, sate, goat, fried banana, to countless other things that we didn't know the names of. Much of it was quite good. Some of it wasn't. Monika even tired a few things and liked them, however, not enough to be full. We stopped at New York Pizza for her dinner and our coffee. We moved the car back to the street from the parking structure after 2200 and in the room read our journal entries to each other. It's after midnight now. My family's asleep. Tomorrow the plan is to take a boat right through the Dutch countryside to see lakes and windmills. --part0_907916860_boundary--