Old School Cooking

Aga cookers are fascinating. Made of cast iron, this stove is fuelled by gas and always on. We found that the top left burner was incredibly hot and boils a large kettle in 5 minutes.

In Harlingen

Muffled Laughter from the Kitchen

If you look close enough you will see that there is an "i" on top of a "j" that appears to form a "u".  Will and Sam think that this is the funniest thing in the world.

On our way to Texel

Geodriehoek and Books

William was on a mission yesterday looking for a geodriehoek, which is a variant of a protractor.  He bought five at Hema and then headed into a used book store.

Police and Football

One of the things that Sam wanted to do in the Netherlands was to meet a Dutch Police officer.  So before we left, I contacted the Bolsward local detachment (about 5 minutes away from where we are staying) and asked if we could drop by.

What was supposed to be a 10 minute visit turned into a 2 hour visit and it has definitely been a highlight for Sam so far.  Melanie and I also have a much better understanding about how policing works at the community level in the Netherlands.

After Bolsward, we headed to Leeuwarden to pick up tickets for the match between SC Cambuur and Telstar.

From there we headed to the Easter market and then went to De Oldehove which is an unfinished church tower in the medieval centre of Leeuwarden. De Oldehove leans more than the tower of Pisa in Italy.

We ended the day with the SC Cambuur match which was a blast. 

Keflavik Sunrise

Bound for Reykyavik

We will arrive at 6am local, with a one hour layover and then on to Amsterdam.

Icelandic Fishing Poetry

I've been following a few Icelandic fly fishing blogs in anticipation of our trip.

Here is a translated gem that speaks to how you can keep your fly line from twisting of the retrieve:

"It is actually very easy to screw up the right of partial bill. If one pinches the reins between the fingers and naglarm stop even the best reins to curl up in order to recover, they can become as Christmas presents band of scissors"

https://fos.is/2017/04/10/ad-sletta-ur-taumi/

T Minus 2

Almost ready to go on another adventure.  We are semi-packed with just small details to take care of.

The weather for the next week looks just so so.

Pre-trip food, culture and a great playlist

Looking back on it, the things we did before the trip were almost as much fun as the trip itself.

We got all kinds of books out of the public library and supplemented those with online resources, like TripAdvisor and Yelp. We bought a few of the traditional travel guides but really didn't use them.

Ordering promotional materials through tourist web sites for the various countries took quite a bit of time and yielded mixed results. We got better info through TripAdvisor reviews on things like which caves would be full of tourists and which were likely to be less busy.

Seeking out and cooking food from these countries made the months before the trip very enjoyable. The flavours were familiar but had a twist. Especially delightful were Icelandic skyr, Alsatian Baeckeoffe, Belgian beer, Dutch Stamppot with Rookworst and Danish Smørrebrød. Trying the food once in Europe, in the villages where it originated, was fantastic.

We tried to watch movies that would get us ready for the trip, but didn't find much that the whole family could watch. Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was fun (especially the longboarding in Iceland). The Swedish/Danish crime drama The Bridge was excellent to get a sense of Copenhagen and Malmö (not for kids). The original Swedish Wallander, set in Ystad in the south if Sweden, was also terrific (also not for kids).

We watched a bunch of travel-related YouTube videos for places we would be visiting. Most of the time, the videos were for people focused on just walking around cities and visiting castles or were for people with really young kids. Not that helpful for our planning.

We listened to audiobooks set in Europe. We particularly liked Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. We did a bit of library book reading on Van Gogh and other artists whose works we were hoping to see in the Rijksmuseum.

I started reading Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See before the trip and finished it during the flight home. It was a fantastic read for travelling across Europe.

What turned out to be a favourite thing was the playlist we built with artists from the countries that we planned to visit. So many great artists that never get played here or suggested through online sources. None of them were playing live where we were, but I would try to arrange for that next time.

To save you having to dig up these songs, have a listen to the Team Chapman Travels 2016 Playlist.

Last, but definitely not least, we need to mention Washed Out's fabulous song, Amor Fati. The video for this song is a delightful teenage travel adventure, shot in Iceland.

Nóa Kropp

It was with trepidation that we opened this bag as this candy suspiciously appeared like the other chocolate-licorice delights from Iceland.

These are surprisingly very good. Kind of like malted milk balls with with something a little different.

7/10