Netherlands - Round The World Tour 2003 T-52
pre-departure
Kerkrade
Monday 20th January
Stuff arrived today and was put into the basement. It went much quicker than I thought it would and we managed to find pretty much everything we wanted to. Diving gear, clothes, fire-box (with my Dutch driver’s license still in it), computers, embroidery machine, etc.
Also went to Maastricht today to buy our tickets to Paris. We managed to get a return ticket for €60 each on the Thalys from Luik. Not sure how we are going to get to Luik to begin with but we’ll figure that out. The plan is to get to Paris, find a hostel or cheap hotel and take things from there. We also picked up a Paris guide and a French translation dictionary. We only have a few days to learn but we’ll see just how far we manage on broken French.
Got a call from Max the other day. He didn’t really need me for anything, he just wanted to call to say hello and to ask how things were. So, I called him back a couple of days later to do the same.
We were going to go to Venlo yesterday but Karin & Wiel were not going to be home so we went bowling with Diana & Lei and the kids instead. It was a lot of fun. Both Diana & Lei spent much of the time dealing with the kids. Although very subtle, this was something that I noticed and it made me stop and think a bit about how our lives are different from theirs with their kids.
On the way back from Maastricht, we stopped in at Bastians care rental to swap some days around. Instead of keeping the car for the 5 days we are in Paris, we are going to give back the car and pick it up again when we return for another 5 days. We end up having the car for the same total number of days but we’ll probably need to pay the slightly higher rental rate since the 3 weeks are no longer unbroken.
Put some more photos up online this evening and wrote the 3rd instalment of our travel log for the benefit of all those on our ever-growing e-mail distribution list.
Picked up our Visa cards from the PTT in Landgraaf this afternoon. Not sure why they were sent to Dinie (they were at the PTT because Dinie was not there to sign for them when they were delivered) to begin with but at least we have them now. We have to go back to Kerkrade tomorrow to have the bank reduce the €10,000 limit on EACH card to just €2,000 each. We also need to go to the municipality building to get my driver’s license renewed. The Kerkrade office should by then have received the information about me back from the Landgraaf office. When I found my driver’s license in the fire box this morning, I checked the expiration date and it just happened to be January 15th (just a few days ago).