contentedsouls

After all the excitement en route to Sneek; it was time to get the boat cleaned up, re-provisioned, and some cooking done before Gill and John arrived. I try to get as much cooking done as possible before visitors arrive so that I can spend as much time as possible with friends and as little time as possible in the galley once they’re here. They arrived in glorious sunshine and we ate out in the evening before heading off in the morning to give them a taste of island moorings and cruising in Friesland. Unfortunately it was foggy and frigging freezing in Friesland so they didn’t get to see a lot! It did, however, cheer up for the cruise the next day; at least enough for Gill to see where she was going!

This seems to be the only picture I took whilst they were here; sorry John, nothing personal! We really enjoyed their company; it was good to catch up and play daft games. I really missed them when they left; a definite case of understaying their welcome – better that than the other way round I suppose – but I felt a bit flat, so I took Muttley for a blast down the beach, replenished the wine stocks (which seemed to have evaporated a bit!) and we headed out onto Goaiingarypster Puollen (I love the Dutch place names, they are so easy to spell, pronounce and remember!). We spent several days there in glorious sunshine and enjoyed some spectacular sunsets straight through our big windows, not to mention bird watching.

I wanted to stay longer because of both the views and the excellent Muttley walking, but G was starting to twitch about the forecast consecutive minus temperatures, so we headed on to Akkrum where we’d left the van. It was a bit of a scrabble time wise, but we made the drive back into ‘closed down to boats’ Sneek and managed to get to the matinee performance of Bohemian Rhapsody. It was good but the sound quality wasn’t, which was a shame as we didn’t get the full benefit of the music and couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other; the Dutch sub-titles didn’t provide a lot of assistance in that area either! I’m glad we went though and, amazingly for us, we both managed to stay awake!

The neighbours at Akkrum were pretty cool.