There's nothing like a real tree!
its too big for me, but I'm assuming she will grow into it, and the predictions are that she will be a head taller than me by the time she is sixteen! And she rides it beautifully, doesn't she. Doesn't she?
In fact, green, open and fresh as it is, Drenthe looks much the same as the rest of rural Holland. However, if you have lived here as long as we have, you begin to see subtle differences in the flatness. We feel a bit like the Inuits, who reportedly have 150 adjectives for snow, in that we can describe Drenthes flatness as very slightly undulating!
The area has been inhabited since prehistory, and we went to the Hunnebedden centrum. Here's Jolanda on top of a neolithic burial site!
And finally to show that we do sometimes spend time together, here is a rare picture (slightly out of focus, I know) of me and John!
This photo is of Murton school football team in 1915. Albert is back row second from right. he and his four brothers were all great sportsmen, I hope to be able to tell you more about them in the next few posts, but this story I found written by him many years ago stands on its own - I have not edited his words
What Have I Been Doing!
I've done it again!
And not a cake but a great flowerpot dessert from pioneer woman
Have a great birthday, and a wonderful few days with your family! All our love from Holland!
We made a last minute dash to England on the ferry from Ijmuiden to Newcastle in the last week of Jolandas school holidays.
Here is John hanging from the top of the photo!
Heres John on a 75 meter long zip wire, which dropped 40 meters! Jolanda did this too, but she was going so fast I could not get a shot!
The quality is not so good, but it gives you some idea of the day - which we all enjoyed very much!
We've just come back from a fantastic holiday, this photo sums up what we did, which was see as much german wildlife as possible whilst staying in a great holiday villa at Mont Royal on the hills above Krov.
And this was the view from our villa early in the morning at the beginning of a hot day
There is lots to do in the area, we took a day to visit Idar-Oberstein and see how the local semi precious stones were worked and polished using water mills. We wanted to go to the mine itself, and followed a path up a steep, wooded, mountainside for too long - feeling a bit like the dwarfs in Snow White. But we seemed to be moving closer to a hunting area, and as the rifle shots got louder and closer together, and the forest got denser, we turned round and went back. We'll do the mine another day!
But the main thing we did was visit the wild animal park at Daun and the wolf and eagle park at Kasselburg. There are lots more photos to see here.
We spent a day in an adventure forest, too, but I forgot the camera, and took photos on my mobile phone - If I can download them I'll post again later in the week. There were some good shots of Jolanda and John on high wires 40 meters up - I had to stay on the ground to take the photos of course!
We went to some great restaurants, Marikas Stuebchen served 400gram steaks and 300 gram schitzels!
And wine from their own vineyards!
After eating there we felt a bit like this!
“I seemed to do nothing but cook and wash dishes”.
Granddad Thompson came up from Whitley Bay on the early bus and ate breakfast with them too, and Molly had a struggle getting the kids ready for school in the mornings, as well as cooking breakfasts on the gas stove out in the washhouse.
Each Monday morning a man called in from Broughts in North Shields and Molly placed an order for most of the shopping with him, which was delivered the next day. Anything else Molly needed she got from the Co-op next door.
Managing the spring cleaning was a major chore for Molly, accustomed to her life at Backworth where her whole time was spent on the household. Here she needed get the cleaning done in an spare hour or two though the day when she was not needed in the shop.
When Emily left to get married, a customer asked if they wanted anyone to help in house and that’s how Edna Stobbart moved in.
“Baden had himself a evening suit measured at “Pearson’s”, I think. I never saw
a penny of that, and had to pluck 2 dozen birds before Christmas.”
"we had a very good team and we had very good teams coming to play so everything had to be spick and span.”
When Molly was nearly sixteen she had a period of illness, and was taken by her father on the Stanhope and Tyne Railway to the farm at Stanhope. They were met at Stanhope station by the farmer and she rode a huge horse bare backed up the long railway to the Farm. Molly developed a friendship with Francis, the daughter of the house and has fond memories of her time spent there, just relaxing with someone her own age, going for walks and to chapel together.
That same year, in the October, Molly’s youngest brother, Jack, was born Molly took on the care of a baby, as well as the household chores. She writes that her mother only had strength to feed Jack, and she did all the rest. Jack as baby of the family was the “apple of Dads eye” and they got on very well. She writes very briefly
“the next 3 years were just looking after Jack and I made two new “Proggy” mats.”
What she mentions in another part of her memoirs is the fact that around the time of Jack's birth, was there was another addition to the family. Her father, Henry, had a family of half brothers and sisters, the Todds, and many of them lived in the same street in Backworth. His half brother Albert, and family lived at no. 15.
In 1919/1920 there was a global flu pandemic, and sadly, Albert and his wife Jenny died of influenza within three weeks of each other, leaving three orphan children, Mary aged 6, Albert aged 5, and Thomas, only three years old. The children were taken in by different families. Mary went to her Aunt Lily, Thomas went to his mothers brothers family (they were called Robson),
and seems to have lost contact with the rest of the family, and Albert moved in with Molly's family, at no 10 Northumberland Tce.
Molly writes that she felt Mary was never happy at Aunties Lily's, which implies that Albert was made very welcome at their house, even though an extra small child must have made a lot of work for her.
I could only do certain things at first, poor dad had scone and his ginger
every day for his pudding.
My sister in law blogged enthusiastically about geocaching: It took me a while to figure out that a global positioning system was, well, global, and it may be possible to do this in the Netherlands, too. She sent me the link http://www.geocaching.com/ and I signed up (its free) to find that here are thousands of caches stashed in the Netherlands.
It took a bit of persuading to get my daughter interested, until she found out
Well today was our first geocaching expedition. I had read the instructions on the website on how to prepare for your first hunt but I did disregard some of the more extreme measures, like looking out for bears, and taking a water filtration system. I picked out three sites, and printed out the coordinates, then packed a bag with drinks and mars bars, programmed the navigation system with the first set of coordinates, added two children to the rest of the stuff in the car, and set off into the unknown.
We drove about 10 minutes away into the countryside around our village, and reached our first destination without mishap, now we had to find the cach. My sister in law told me they find caches in Tupperware boxes under trees, so when the kids asked what they were looking for that’s what I told them, but twenty fruitless minutes later I reassessed the situation, and we started looking for something smaller. They finally found a strange plastic tube, filled with concrete, marked with GC, hidden behind a fence post. Underneath this was a Kodak film pot, and inside this was a rolled up log book. I might have known the Dutch would do it differently!
