Oh, the Agony!

I've had nagging thoughts that we are not keeping in touch well enough, not sending enough postcards, not making enough FB posts, not writing personal emails very often. Further, I have hardly made any drawings for the past week. What happened?

The "office" on our host's dining-room table

This has been a week of traveler's angst. We have been chained to our desk - our host's dining-room table, actually - trying to find a livable place in Amsterdam for the second half of September. Or, maybe we want to spend part of that time in Texel? Or in Ede-Waginen, or maybe Brussels or Luxembourg, or even Rotterdam? What about the Hague? the North Sea dunes? What are the connections between these places, and then how do we go on to Spain for 3 weeks in October? and where in Spain? and how do we exit Spain for Italy? How many hours can we sit and stare at our laptops, getting blurry-eyed and cranky?

The tough travel connections make some things clear. We won't hop off the train for a couple days at Ede-Waginen near the Kroller-Muller Museum, because we'd have 4 changes with our luggage. So, Ede will be a day-trip from Amsterdam instead. Also, we cut the side-trips going south because of connections, which are less than easy.

Julianne takes a break, does sukoku

The train to Spain's a pain, that's plain. You really have to fly from Amsterdam to Barcelona. Then in Spain are lots of convenient trains to Madrid and all around, but eek! the prices! 

Oh wait, a Rube-Goldberg apparatus of discounts. 20% off for this, 40% off for that, and my favorite, 60% off if you buy four seats facing each other, whether or not you sit in all of them. There are multi-trip discounts, large-family discounts, old-age discounts, student discounts .... but no matter what, you can't take more than two big parcels or two live animals per person on the train.

So we got that sorted, as they say around here. Next. 

We kept having no luck finding places in Amsterdam at prices we could manage. Then after days of dither and hassle, all at once on Friday it all worked out. We just had to go far enough out, to an old industrial-cum-arts town, with a windmill museum and extensive surrounding marshes for bird-watching. Wormerveer. 

Our apartment faces a canal with working boats and a view of the distant city. The kitchen is teeny but the visuals are lovely, and frequent trains go directly to Amsterdam-Centraal in about 30 minutes. Two weeks of that for us.

Then Madrid for a week, then Tarragona (south of Barcelona) for 9 days or so, staying in a wee apartment actually inside a Roman-era wall. We seem to find more fun places on the margins of major places. Natually, we'll visit Barcelona. And it's from Barcelona that we'll start the next phase, taking a ferry to Genoa and a train to Pisa and then another train to Florence, to meet our friends and relations late in October. Whew!

After all that, on Satuday, time for an afternoon trip to the local farmers' market, held up the street from us at St. Mark's in Kennington Park. Conga drummers, honey stands, purveyors of specialty meats, and fruits, and veg, and so on. Even a coffee stand, gratefully.

Our take-home from the market included lovely perfect raspberries, English peas for shelling (sadly over the hill it turned out), sausage from the Giggly Pig, cheese from the Wyfe of Bath. So we had a good time, and felt better.