raxacorricofallapatorius

For my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandmother.



And perhaps, someday, for my daughter, too. But not until she's at least 25! ;c)

FINALLY got the photos of our boat trip downloaded. So here they are! As always, click to enlarge.

After pulling out of the boatyard, one of the first things we encountered was one of these cliches.


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So that was our day. It was long, but mostly relaxing, and I got to see Amsterdam from a completely new vantage point. Not a bad way to spend a warm spring day at all. ;c)

Our original plan was to visit a couple of cities in Germany as we headed down to Italy. What actually happened was something more along the lines of a race against the weather.

Our first planned stop, Koblenz, was passed right by, as it was raining buckets. We ended up finally crawling into a campsite in Manheim at about 10 p.m. It was right on the Rhine, and we fell into exhausted sleep listening to German dance music from the cantina at the end of the campgrounds.



This is the view from just outside our camper early the next morning. Speiky got a quick swim in, and then we headed back out to our next stop, which was supposed to be Stuttgart. We'd come so far the previous day, however, that we skipped it and went straight on to Munich. Again, not much in the way of photos, since I was pretty much confined to shooting from the passenger seat window. But I took some goofy shots just to pass the time.





The traffic was horrific all the way through Germany. There is some extensive roadwork being done all over the country, it seems, and we spent waay too much time sitting still. Also the weather was still chasing us. When we finally arrived in Munich, it began to pour almost immediately.

Our biggest new toy this trip was the TomTom, and for the most part, it was a wonder and a joy. Every now and then, however, it seemed to get confused, such as when we were among tall trees or buildings. We spent over an hour trying to locate a campsite in Munich because "Tom" kept getting confused and sending us off into non-existent left turns.



Up early again the next morning, we hit yet more city traffic.



One of the more peculiar things we passed on our way out was a huge cemetery, the Waldfriedhof, right in the middle of the city. And across the busy city streets, lots of office buildings with stonemasons on the ground floor of the buildings, with displays of tombstones of every imaginable design right on the street. It was creepy in a very efficient sort of way. I didn't manage to get any photos of them, alas, as I was on the cemetery side of the road. I was able to get glimpses of something unusual over the tops of the walls and between the gaps in the gates - wooden grave markers. They looked a little like two-dimensional birdhouses.

We finally made it out of town, and then on to Austria and the Alps. I'll post that one next. I promise, it gets more interesting and more beautiful from here on out. :c)

Source: http://englishrussia.com/?p=1133

Click Through to get the effect....*grumblegrumblestupidLJgrumble*

Via: voltair.com

WARNING: The click-through is HUGE. Dial-up beware!

Spent the day building a fort with the kids. I think I've mentioned before that hubby's parents live in a houseboat on a dike, and own a huge strip of polderland alongside the "ark" where they raise Shetland ponies. A polder is the flat, depressed land in between the dikes. Usually it's used as grazing land for cattle and sheep. Anyway, the polder is divided into large rectangles, with small canals or "sloots" being the dividers. The sloot dividing the in-law's land from their neighbor's is wider at one end than at the other, and in the middle of this larger area is a small island approximately 20 meters long and about 3 meters wide. It's covered in trees and bushes, but in the middle it's fairly flat and empty save for grass.

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Not a bad way to spend a Sunday. ;c)

ETA: PHOTOS!

Squeee! More Snapey goodness. This via Leaky Cauldron/Portus:




More new photos, including a first look at Young Lily at The Leaky Cauldron.

Completed tangential to my previous post. Aren't they cute? Pizza and Coke (although I think Dan may be drinking something a bit stronger; it's hard to tell.)





ETA: My bad. I thought everyone would recognize this, but apparently not. This is one of the outtakes of the TeenVogue photo shoot of the Trio that just made the rounds. Oh, and on further examination, there is a group of the glass bottles like that next to Dan further up on the table, and those look to be filled with water, so maybe it's just some fancy-schmancy bottled stuff.

Here's the original link for those who didn't see it before.