Catching up with family and friends in Wijchen and Den Bosch

Saturday, August 29, 2015

On Saturday Leonie and Ferdy leave for Paris.  I drop them of early in the morning at Nijmegen railway station for them to catch the train.

In the afternoon I am to meet up again with Peter, a (great?)cousin or cousin-once-removed. I don't know exactly, but we met a few years ago and are related through our grandfather on my mother's side.  We both like working on our family trees and thus have a common interest.

Peter comes to Wijchen to visit me and we have a cup of coffee here before we set off to Wijchen centre where we want to visit a cemetery.  We hope to find the graves of our great-aunt and great-uncle who have lived in Wijchen.  The graves cannot be found, however we do see Peter's parents' graves. A knock on the door at the presbytery, to find out more about old grave sites, goes unanswered.

Next we walk to the town centre and find the house where greataunt Riek and great-uncle Thom used to live.  He was a watchmaker, and may have been a juweler too, and the house and shop are still there.  It's even got a juweler's business still present.

After that we find a restaurant and something to drink and chat until we discover it's high time to leave.  By then it's 7 pm!

We had a great afternoon altogether and had lots of things to talk about.  Time flies when you're having fun.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

On Sunday Nicole, from Houten, and I were going to go geocaching, but the weather is not optimal.  We had thunderstorms during the night which lasted till mid-morning, so the chance that everything would be dry enough to search for caches were minimal.

Instead we decided to stay at home and I tried to solve a few puzzle caches, with little success I may add!

I felt rather like going out, because the weather had much improved.  I rang my friend Jose in Den Bosch and asked if she wanted to come to the fair that night. She did!

I drove to Den Bosch where we met at her place, had coffee and then we rode to the centre on the bike.  There is a great free bicycle parking area right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle, so that's where we parked and we didn't have far to walk.

We had poffertjes (a kind of puffed up little pancake a lot of foreigners now seem to know so well) and we had a beer; Jose a pink beer and I the brown Leffe that I like so much.

Poffertjes and Leffe Bruin

'Cheers'

After an ice cream to top it all off we rode back to Jose's place, had another cuppa (I skipped something stronger as I had to drive back home) and after some more chatting I left rather late.  As it was, too late, because after a warm night we had a thunderstorm with rain and hail!