Gone Camping

And back already. The weekend of 13/14 May I went camping with a group from Tafelstraat. It was rather a lot of fun. This was no real out in the wild camping trip, however; there were no grizzly bears lurking in the woods, hungry wolves stalking majestic elks on the plains, imperial eagles (two-headed, presumably?) snatching fish from the wild rivers. This was because we were camping in Elleke’s backyard, and her family has a conservative approach to keeping pets (apparently, one land owner in Scotland wishes to set loose wolves and brown bears in his domains, but he is not being encouraged by the locals).

The weather was rather good, and we were lucky, as there was rain all over the country whereas we only had one shower during the night. We made quite a long walk, just under 20 km, over long and narrow lanes past long and narrow canals lined with trees, which gave it all a certain… predictability. The following day we went canoeing, something I hadn’t done since I was 6. This was not exactly comparable to canoeing in the Ardennes, mastering the wild water flow and going at tremendous speeds down waterfalls; no, as this was Drenthe, there was no wild water unless the wind got particularly fierce, so we canoed down a, err, long and narrow canal. Lined with trees etc.

Despite lacking any real experience with canoes, the canoeing went pretty well. Martijn and Ivan were also in my canoe, with Martijn being the only one with any experience. We started out with myself at the front, Ivan in the centre and Martijn in the back, though halfway through Martijn and Ivan switched around and we seemed to be going faster then. Our canoe was the last out of four to leave the riverside, but we were quickly on our way to get to the front. Curiously enough, the last canoe to leave before us, staffed with only Niniane and Germa, was doing better than any of the others, both of which had three rowers, going first after a bit of a chase with the other two. But we eventually managed to paddle beside them and a tense match followed that would probably make Oxford and Cambridge proud. During the race, Niniane lost her paddle, but I managed to grab it from the water and handed it back to her, ruining both our chances at success as moments later both canoes hit the opposite banks of the river. One of the other two canoes then took over and we could start all over again, though I can reassure the regular readers with the news that in the end our canoe got to the turn-around point first, in fact with enough time for us to orderly turn our canoe around and still wait for two minutes while the others came on.
Oh, and I also saw two grey partridges, a pheasant and a kiekendief. Sadly I am too lazy a person to look up its English name, but I’m fairly sure it was Barry (har har, pun!).