Texel- November 7, 2008

Today we did a few more geocaches. Our total for the week ended at 21. All but two were micros, but those are tricky to find sometimes!

We took the ferry back to the "mainland" and then had a very very long traffic-jam filled drive home.

I'll post a wrap-up of the trip tomorrow, but methinks it's bedtime now.

Texel- November 6, 2008

A few weeks ago Martijn was reading his magazine that we get free from the ANWB (like AAA in the US) and he spotted something interesting that we could do when we came up here – The Schipbreuk en Juttersmusem. Schipbreuk means shipwreck, and jutten means to scavenge beaches. So a jutter is a person who scavenges beaches for interesting things. One such person is the man who founded the museum, Jan Uitgeest. He's been scavenging the beaches for things that have washed ashore for the past 56 years and has amassed quite a collection! The museum has a lot of life preservers, buoys, fisherman gloves, and other “normal” boat things that you might expect. But the interesting things are the unexpected ones: four thousand cans of powdered milk, televisions, hard hats (apparently lots of people lose their hard hats at sea), suitcases, and tennis balls.

We headed over to the museum and realized once we got there that we had no cash on us. Well, that's not completely true. I had two 50 cent coins in my pocket and Martijn had at least four 5 cent coins, so we weren't quite destitute, but it wasn't enough to pay the entry fee. So we said we'd be back and Meneer Uitgeest told us to go inside and after we were done to come back and pay later! I thought that was quite generous and we really enjoyed the time we spent there. The video of him explaining some of his funny adventures was all in Dutch but I was able to piece together some of it, and Martijn helped me by explaining a lot of it afterward. After we left and did a couple of geocaches we finally found an ATM so we could pull out some money and go pay the man! He laughed and said thanks for coming back to pay since he'd completely forgotten. We even got an autographed brochure.

The caches we went after were in the dunes known as De Muy. The first one was a rather quick find, but the second one involved some walking and climbing of lots and lots of stairs. I shouldn't complain though, at least I wasn't trying to walk my way up a huge pile of sand. There was a really lovely view from the top.

That's the sea way off in the distance, shrouded in the FOG!

Texel- November 5, 2008

Today found us making an emergency trip to the pharmacy (Dutch: apotheek) because I didn't eat the required 50 cups of yogurt per minute needed to combat the bad effects of the antibiotics. The plus side was, we did get to explore the town of Den Burg a little bit. All 50 houses of it – including one supermarket selling moldy avocados (more on that travesty later).


Since it was windy and cold we decided that we'd had enough outdoor explorations and headed to the Ecomare. It's a museum and wildlife rehabilitation center for seals and birds on the island and in the surrounding areas. They have a lot of neat information on how the island of Texel was formed and over industries in the North Sea. The best part was, of course, the seals. I did like the little teeny crabs that we saw in the aquarium they have in the basement. Also, did you know that there were woolly rhinoceroses in the ice age? Cause I sure didn't.

This little guy was trying to escape into the pool next door, unsuccessfully, I might add.


Strangely enough, they used sheep's wool to make this woolly rhino's coat.

After the Ecomare, we headed back to number 123 to have some lunch. We decided to take the rest of the day off and just have a quiet afternoon since Martijn wasn't feeling that great. It was fine by me too – I got to steal the cute little new toy and play with it for awhile. By the way, his new name is Ned.

Martijn cooked us tacos for dinner, but when he went to cut up the avocado we discovered it should've gone to the grave far before we bought it cause it was moldy and rather unpleasant inside. Annoying, since we JUST BOUGHT IT TODAY!

Now we are just arguing if “should've” is actually a word. I say yes, Ned says no, and my wicked husband agrees with the computer. Such loyalty. It's a word I say! A contraction, but that counts as a word, right???

Texel- November 4, 2008

Yesterday we left Eindhoven around noon to drive to Den Helder, where we boarded the ferry that brought us to Texel.

We arrived at the bungalow park a little after 3 (good timing, since that was the time that we could check in), checked in, and made our way to bungalow number 123. It's a cute little two bedroom place, but of course it's 4 single beds. LUCKILY this time we aren't battling against a chasm of death or bunk beds. The kitchen is workable and even has a gas stove, which we don't even have at home. We spent a little while making ourselves at “home” and then took a 4 km walk around the area. It was our intention to find a nearby geocache, but by the time we got where it was supposed to be, it was getting dark and we couldn't see well enough to poke around and find it.


Last night when we went to bed we decided not to set an alarm since we are on vacation after all. Somehow I think waking up at 7am this morning made that a futile decision. Luckily both of us were able to fall back asleep for a little while.


Today we went to the tippy top of the island to see the lighthouse (Dutch: vuurtoren). The problem with this plan was the insane amount of fog!

See what I mean?


The fog wasn't a deterrent for our caching efforts though. We manged to find six in various places around the island. There were a few we didn't manage to track down, but it still gave us the opportunity to explore around a bit. It would've been nice if the fog wasn't so thick but we did (sorta) see some neat stuff.

One of the places we went to was De Schans fort. It was established by Willem van Oranje in the 16th century to prevent the Spanish from taking back Texel. The fort was used until the middle of the 19th century. In 1931, half of it was demolished in order to place a dike. Napoleon added two smaller forts on either side (which have since been demolished) and it was used by merchant ships as a safe haven when they couldn't get to Amsterdam or to the North Sea.

And we're off

My puffy head isn't any worse, so we're going to go ahead and go. We wrote down the urgent care doctor information for Texel and we'll just go there if it gets worse!

So for now we're

It's the ONE!

Today's post is brought to you by Martijn's cute new toy! He used some of his overtime pay to purchase this little beauty (or very handsome machine... it still has no name and is thus genderless)-

Acer Aspire One

He got the 8 GB solid state memory model, so we'll watch for a good deal on a 16 GB SD card to upgrade the memory. It runs on Acer's flavor of Linux, Linpus (which sounds like a disease... "I'm sorry sir, you've got three months to live, it's Limpus."). It's so teeny and cute! I thought it would be really hard to type on due to the very small keyboard, but it's actually not that bad. I wouldn't want to write a novel with it, but for blog posts, it works alright! Martijn might live to regret me borrowing it to write this post. I'm already hooked on the frozen penguin game.

He monkeyed around with it all weekend, only taking a break to take my puffy headed self to the doctor yesterday (that's true love right there I tell you). Lots of "tinkering" lead to three crashes, one image reinstall, and one backup restore so far. I'm sure there's some sort of nerdy trophy for how many times you can reinstall your computer in the first 3 days you own it.

I leave you with a picture taken with the built in webcam.

I have a swollen face, be nice.

Welcome to November!

I signed up to do NaBloPoMo (that sounds kinda dirty, doesn't it?). It's "National Blog Posting Month." I thought it would be fun to participate. What I didn't think about was the fact that we're going to be gone next week, and then a weekend in the middle of the month... which will make the "post everyday" rule interesting. I will post everyday, but -how- I post might be bending the rules a little.

I've come down with something I thought was an ear infection, but the doctor wasn't so sure and thought it was a salivary gland infection that was up and causing havoc. Knowing my luck I have an ear infection AND a salivary gland infection. Yah know, cause I can't be bothered doing anything unless I do a REALLY good job of it (even being sick). I have oral antibiotics and ear drops. If it's not feeling better tomorrow evening, then something else is wrong and I'm supposed to go back to the doctor on Monday... which will have some effect on our vacation plan for next week.

Speaking of the vacation plan, we're heading up to Texel (say it like you would say tessellation, minus the ation). Neither of us have been before, so we're looking forward to it. Plus, there's lots of geocaches up there! I just have my fingers crossed that the antibiotics will do their job and we'll notice some difference in my condition so we feel safe going.

Here's a google map of where it is. Eindhoven is way down south-east of the island. If you zoom out a couple times, you can see it.

View Larger Map