NB: For all those people who aren't really interested in the details of my vacation, you can just look at the pics, and click them to see larger versions and more pics ;-)

July 2005: the kids and I put up our tent for two weeks on nature campsite "Olde Kottink".

The trip started quite disappointing: On the way to the underground station both Tiago and Gabriël tripped and fell, hurting both knees and Tiago even his elbow too. Blood and tears, right until the metro arrived.

After only 3 stops, the train stopped and we were told we had to wait because some idiot was walking on the track. After about 10 minutes the intercom said we wouldn't go any further at all anymore, so we had to get outside the station and wait for replacement buses. Knowing this would take a while (lots of people and obviously the buses had to depart from their depot still), I called my sister to ask if she could pick us up to take us to Central Station. It appeared she didn't have time, but her friend, Franz, didn't mind to do it, so he gave us a ride to the train station.

Once on the train we thought the rest of the journey would be without trouble, but halfway the normal service got interrupted, as another train which was 20 minutes late, had to be hooked up with ours, so they scheduled a 20 minute delay. However, after the train was connected, we still didn't leave. After a while we were told to get off the train, because of a defect.

Anyway, after that, we actually got on a train straight to our destination, and the connecting bus arrived within 5 minutes, so that was alright. The woman who owns the camping site came to pick us up at the busstop too, which saved us a 2,5 km walk with backpacks and tent.

We were directed to a nice spot on a field that only had tents. No caravans or motor homes, just tents. There were cyclists with very small tents and families with large bungalow tents with furniture and everything in it. All tents were positioned on the four sides of the field, and there was a sandbox in the middle.

The web site of the camp ground stated that the place was like a large playground to young kids who have enough fantasy, and as soon as the kids had their first look around this field with nothing more than a sandbox, Gabriël proclaimed that the web site surely wasn't wrong, this really was a good place for kids with a lot of fantasy.

We unpacked the tent, put it up, got the sleeping bags and other stuff inside, and there we were - set for a two week holiday without television, internet, or even electric lighting. This camp ground is a so called "natuurcamping", which is Dutch for "nature camp ground". It means there are no bingo nights, no discos, no parties, and no noise.

Quite a few of these nature campsites don't even have hot water in the showers, but chicken that I am, I opted for this one, that has not only hot water showers, but also a fridge, freezer, microwave oven and washingmachine and dryer. Being 2 hours walk away from any decent supermarket, especially the fridge was a very good thing.

We had arrived quite late in the afternoon, so we just stayed at the site, and had instant noodles for dinner, which we had brought from home. The kids just love these noodles with chicken flavour, and whilst munching away, Tiago told me I was the best Mum ever, cause I could cook such nice food! :-)

Tiago was also the one who mentioned how much he liked it there: "I really like that we're camping here, and we're even gonna sleep in a tent as well!"

The next day I figured we should explore the surroundings a bit, so we went on a walk through the typical Dutch nature. The area where we were, is made up of farms, meadows and woods, which makes for a much varied landscape.

When we found a corn field, I thought this would be a good setting to take a picture of the kids in their Brasil shirts, to send to their family in Brazil, so they would have a picture of Gabriël and Tiago in a typically Brazilian setting. It proved quite difficult though, to get both kids look naturally spontaneous in one picture, especially when asking them to pose...

Obviously, once the preferred setting is out of sight, all of a sudden they pose exactly how you would have liked them to. I reckoned I'd still take the picture.

Another thing I liked a lot, was the supply of fresh bread every morning. During the daytime there was a list on the table at reception, where you could just fill out how much bread you wanted the next morning, and the next day, you could just go buy it at reception, without having to walk an hour to the nearest place that sells bread. It was very nice bread too - croissants, multi-grain bread and regular white buns. All as fresh as could be.

I had picked the campsite largely based on the surroundings, but the kids preferred to stay on the campsite, to play in the sandbox, and to run around the field with other kids. So, except for a couple of times when I convinced them to go for a walk, and one or two actual trips, we only left to do the shopping.

For our daily supper/dinner/tea (depending on which part of the world you're in, but I mean the hot food), we had to go to a supermarket every second or third day, which was a bit of a walk really - the nearest town was only one km from the campsite, but only had a very small and expensive corner shop. So we usually only stopped at the local cafe for an ice-cream, to continue the journey to the next city, about 3 km altogether I think. It was okay to walk with the kids, who only got tired when getting close to the campsite on the way back. A weird definition of tired though, as right after we actually got back to the tent, they'd start running around the field again.

As I said, these type of campsites don't do parties, discos or bingo nights. This one did one thing though: story telling for the kids.

Fridaynight around 5.30 pm, a princess with a big book under one arm and a bell in the other hand, walked on to our field, ringing the bell to call all the kids to come with her.

From our field she went to the next, and so covered the entire campsite, collecting all the kids.

They then sat down in a nice spot at the back of the camp ground, where the princess (complete with blue starry dress and golden crown) opened the book and read two fairy tales.

The kids were so much into the stories, that they didn't even notice I was there until the second story was finished.

The princess let Tiago carry the book back to reception, where they all got some sweet before returning to their parents.

We didn't bring bicycles, as neither Gabriël nor Tiago knew how to ride one yet, and they're already to heavy for me to cycle comfortably with them in the seats.

However, one day I was taking a nap in the tent (yes, I was there for my rest too), when I was woken up by enthusiastic kids.

The owner of the camp ground had a spare kids' bike, and lent it to Gabriël to learn how to cycle.

So, we pushed him, and within minutes I only held the back of his shirt while running alongside him, as he learned very quickly. He didn't realize that though, and got a bit upset when he found out I was only holding his shirt, instead of securing him really. This was all on the grass field though, and he soon found that falling on grass doesn't hurt much, and cycling on hardened road was very easy :-)

From day one, the kids played a lot with Emile, who was about their age, and stayed in the tent next to ours with his Mum, Hendrika. They left after one week though, and on their last day, they invited us on a short trip to a nice spot on the local river, the Dinkel, where the kids could "swim" and play, while we mostly just relaxed, sitting in the sand on the side of the river.

Translated from a local warning sign:

"The Dinkel is one of the last natural untouched rivers in our country, where you can see how the water finds its own course undisturbed. Because of this, river banks sometimes get flooded and collapse like a house of cards, whether there are trees on them or not. Because of this natural proces, the river changes its course continuously."

Obviously, we weren't swimming at one of the dangerous spots, as the warning sign was accompanied by barbed wire to mark the hazardous areas.

The next morning Hendrika and Emile started packing up their tent, and as the clouds were packing together, I helped them so they could finish it before it would start to rain. Well... they were very lucky, as it started raining quite heavily, right after the last bit of luggage and tent were put in the car's trunk! If it weren't for Hendrika's umbrella, we wouldn't even have said goodbye, as it was raining too hard to leave the tent really.

The day Hendrika and Emile left, their spot on the field was taken by a family of four — including a boy named Renze, which again was about the same age as Gabriël and Tiago. They almost immediately hit it off together, and were pretty much inseparable the for the remainder of our vacation.

It took the kids almost all of that week though before they actually called him by his name, as they kept referring to him as 'the son of the cowboy', because his father was always wearing a black cowboy hat.

I don't drive or own a car, and during our stay on that campsite several people offered to take us to places that were too far to walk, and often enough we could even hitch a ride with the campsite owner or her kids to the city where we did our shopping.

Pieter was our neighbour on the other side, and had promised to take us for a ride to the heathlands, which in the Netherlands stands for very large areas full of nothing but heather. I had seen it as a kid, and wanted to show my kids what it looked like too.

As he and his family were leaving a couple of days earlier than they had planned because of the weather forecast, the only time left to make that trip happened to be in the evening, which explains the rather dark picture of the heather, and the beautiful sunset I just had to take a picture of.

This second week gave a lot of rain and even some hail, but also plenty of sunny spells in between, so the kids were in raincoats one moment, and eating popsicles wearing only shorts the next.

The only thing I bought for them to play with during the two weeks we were there, were a frisbee, one colourbook and 12 unbreakable colour pencils. This colourbook and the pencils came in quite handy during the second week of our stay, where it was raining intermittently but more often than not. On one day we even stayed inside the tent the entire day. Only got out to go to the toilet, and to do the washing up after dinner.

It's amazing what two kids can do with only one colourbook and 12 pencils. They didn't complain even once that day! In fact, when I asked that evening which they actually preferred - a day out on the field in the sun, playing with their friends, or staying inside the tent all day because of the rain, they were indecisive. Gabriël concluded: "both".

I didn't want to test their ability to combat boredom for more than one whole day though, so we did some indoor stuff on the rainier days. One day we went to Natura Docet, the oldest regional museum of natural history in the Netherlands.

On display were both big mammuths and tiny butterflies, fluffy rabbits and ancient fossiles. We spent quite a bit of time in the museum, as I happen to have kids who want to know everything!

Another indoor event was the candle shop, where the kids not only got to make their very own candles and had them coloured in their own choice of colour, but they also learned that one minute is 60 very long seconds when you are holding a piece of wood with two candles hanging from it.

An advantage of the rain was that the mornings were a bit cooler, so we could sleep in a little longer.

Long before our vacation, the kids already had a fixed idea about camping, probably picked up from American TV-series like The Wild Thornberrys or As Told By Ginger: catch and cook your own fish for the evening meal, and melt marshmallows over a campfire.

I did manage to replace the idea of 'catching and cooking our own fish' with the concept of 'buying and cooking our own food', but melting marshmallows of course remained a must-have.

The weather didn't look promising though, as in the second week, it was raining just about every evening, and we wished we had had our campfire in the first week, instead of making it a 'final night' thing.

Surprisingly, when it came to be our last night it wasn't raining at all, so we thought we'd have a go at it. We got matches and dry newspapers and headed to the designated place for campfires, beside the reception. There was one big log of wood in the fire basket, but it was still wet from that morning's rain, and so were all the other logs that for some reason were piled up against a wall without any form of roof over it.

Against better knowledge, I tried to get a fire going, but no luck whatsoever. A couple of kids were watching me, and one smart-arse 7 year old told me her father always manages to make a fire. I told her to go get her Dad to prove it...

Well, as she got her father to help, it soon was clear that she hadn't exaggerated at all and with a little help of another guy functioning as a human pair of bellows, he soon got the fire up and going, and we had our much anticipated campfire with marshmallows on pointy sticks :-)