Truck Parade

This is not my video, and I wasn't there, but I sure like it. Modern trucks (mostly) parading through an old town. This is Baud, where the McNeills live now (Helena the Fortunate, for some of you).

Apparently something about American vehicles. :-)

A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I saw these (unrelated to the event above) on a Thursday afternoon, on a motorway near her house:

I don't get the chassis, so that's a mystery. If anyone knows, please leave a comment!

Connections in all directions

I loved my time in the Netherlands. Rippy and Graham were exceptional hosts and their family is sweet.

Rippy and I went up into the belltower (not as high as the carillion bells, but pretty far up) with one of their every-half-hour tours of six people. That by itself was pretty cool. A tour guide and six people go up and come down and then another group of six goes.

There's a walkway all the way around, 40 meters up. This photo was brought to mind by one that Lori Odhner had on her Marriage Moats blog today, so I've brought them onto the same page. They are, in a way, just the same. :-)

The photo Lori used is by Brita Conroy, and it accompanied Lori's writing about different cultures, and families, and houses.
Click it to get to that post, if you want to.

More photos from the day in Amsterdam may be viewed here, but don't expect them all to be as pretty as the one above. Some are coots' nests on odd things in canals. Some are sad. Some are fuzzy. There are two pipe organs, in the same church. These two photos go together:

Stamppot dinner

I had two kinds of stamppot, made by Graham Dusseldorp, the dad of my host family. He said it's more a winter dish, and the green one (with kale) is the more regular kind his mom makes. The purple one had red cabbage and apples. Both were good but I liked the purple one better. There were two kinds of sausage—one for each—but the gravy was the same for both, and was what the cooked sausages had been in.

Rippy and I had been in Amsterdam all day where we went to canal tour boats and climbed up the bell tower at the Westerkerk. There will be photos.

But back to that dinner thing:

So I had two dinners. A Stamppot Sampler! :-)

The Netherlands

I have a blog post on my Europe 2012 blog about Leiden: http://sandraeurope2012.blogspot.nl/2012/06/leiden-in-netherlands.html

I'm speaking today and probably won't be in here, but wanted to let anyone who would like more photos know that most days deposits into photobucket are available to peruse (some are boring, some are inexplicable to anyone but me, but some are good) and they're linked on the schedule here:
http://sandraeurope2012.blogspot.nl/p/speaking.html

This photo is from a playground we went to yesterday with other home ed families. There was a system of wooden aqueducts in a sandbox with a water pump up top. There are lots of other photos here

Where I'm speaking

Today we went to a large playground, across the street from the school where the presentations will be tomorrow. We went to the school after classes were over to set up for Saturday.

That's what the biggest space looks like empty. At any given time, some of the adults and most of the children will be outside that window or in a playground down to the right.

I'm going to try to sleep extra long because my leg is hurting and I want to be alert and I'm falling asleep, even though it's not 10:00 pm yet. It's still bright outside, but I'm not so bright inside. :-)

Leiden, in the Netherlands

This is my third day in Leiden, in the Netherlands. I'm having so much fun I don't have time to make web posts, but if you want to look at the photos I've taken, the links are below. Some will make obvious sense and some won't, but they're for me. :-) If you enjoy some of them, you're welcome to it.

http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Europe/Sandra2012/June27LeidenHouseboat/?start=all

Julie and Adam are staying in a houseboat, and the photos are the walk from Rippy's house there, and then down to the old part of Leiden and the market, and back to the house. The stairs are steep and spooky and exciting.

http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Europe/Sandra2012/June28LeidenBoatTour/?start=all

We went on a canal tour, so some of the photos are of the bridges. There are lots of little drawbridges and others on the smaller canals that they had to lower the roof of the bridge to get under, and there's a video of that.

The windmill is a reconstruction of someone's dad's windmill.

There are bikes everywhere, and all permutations of extra-riders and cargo bikes.

I took photos from the only hill in Leiden. They built a hill for a fortress/tower, and there are arrow slits in the bottom part, and a walkway up top.

There's a light...

My favorite part of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the one verse of "There's a Light" where Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien, the composer) sings

The darkness must go down the river of nights dreaming
Flow morphia slow, let the sun and light come streaming
Into my life, into my life.

During that verse, there is a zoom to a close-up of him in a window in a tower. I can't find an image to include here, and I'm not home with my DVD and big TV to get an image. If you've seen it, you remember, though. And yesterday I was there.

In the foreground of the more distant shot is a fairy ring on the ground. The closeup is of some of the mushrooms. They weren't up all the way around, but very clearly in a few places, and the ring did show.

We've had smaller fairy rings in our front yard. They're natural, but it's easy to see how they gave way to superstitious tales and fears that something had happened overnight that could have been a threat to the security of people who had been sleeping.

I wish I had measured it. I think it was over six feet across though; maybe eight feet. Wikipedia talks about smaller ones and larger ones here, and with google image you can see lots of them. I was glad to be able to show it to Adam.

A note on the UK Rocky Horror fan site says, of the building's use as a set:

Actually it's now a prestige hotel, although at the time of filming The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Oakley Court was a dilapidated shell. The crew had to work around buckets catching the rainwater from the holes in the roof and tread carefully on the old rotting timbers. It is said that most of the cast caught very bad colds during filming. *

We were there for afternoon tea. Nice place!

There are framed posters and such from other movies filmed there, back in the day between it being a nice home and being a luxury hotel. Mostly monster movies.

wikipedia says...