Family reunion and the price of bacon

So Ruth and I are now pretty much moved into our house sitting home for the next five weeks. We're located near the village of Manotick which is a kind of a trendy upscale village with a lot of very high end homes that line the Rideau River.

But we're a little unfamiliar with what are the best (least expensive?) grocery stores in the area. We ended up at a Your Independent and Ruth went inside while I stayed in the car.

Well, that was a successful day!

We were up at 5:30am Saturday morning, moving stuff around before it got too hot out. Man, that was a lot of work. We can't believe how one guy can own that much stuff. It really makes us appreciate our simple lifestyle!

People began arriving at about 8:00am for the 10:00am start of the auction. The auctioneer himself arrived at 9:00am, along with his five helpers! 

Ready for the auction!

Well, the big day is here. It took five of us pretty much all day to move almost everything outside. Only the larger furniture items remain inside. 

But it was pretty warm trying to move all that stuff around when the temperature was 32C (88F). We took a lot of breaks and drank a lot of water.

New sandals, and Sydney the cat...

Starting Saturday evening, we will be house and cat sitting for the next five weeks. So yesterday, we drove over to the community of Manotick just south of Ottawa to say hello to the couple who own the house, and to meet Sydney the cat.

We were supposed to be looking after two cats. But when we arrived, we were told that they had lost one. At first, we took that to mean it had passed away. But it was only ten years old. 

How to Keep Yourself Entertained as you Travel

By its nature, traveling will often have downtime where you have to spend hours doing little to nothing, which is why you should always be prepared to entertain yourself.

Travel with a Buddy

The first rule of traveling is to always travel with a buddy when you can. There are plenty of reasons why it’s a good idea to have a travel buddy, from safety to boredom, so it’s probably a good idea that you just make sure to take someone with you when you can. Travel to work with your coworkers, take your friends or family on holiday, go to the movies with others. Wherever you are traveling, don’t do it alone.

Cameron's watermelon pics

Another day of organizing auction stuff. We're actually just about done as much as we can do for now. There is nothing left in the basement except for our stuff which we will go through today. And upstairs is pretty much empty except for the heavier furniture.

When we had sold our house in 2007, we ended up with about a dozen Rubbermaid storage bins and had whittled that down to three over the years. As time went on, we just couldn't justify keeping the "stuff" and wondered why we kept most of it to begin with. 

The Essential Road Trip Tech

Whether you’re in an RV, camper van or in the SUV driving to your next holiday destination, there are a few essential tech items that you must have with you. Travel is always an exciting time and often there are things that are neglected in the planning phase that will adversely affect your trip. One of the main aspects that can be neglected is the tech that you take.

We'll get out and do our walk early before things warm up!

There's a really good circular walking route that we follow here in Galetta. It's exactly 5 kms (3 miles) and it's got a few small hills so it's really good exercise when it's done at a fast pace. As a bonus, it's really quite scenic too.

When we've done it in past years, our time for doing such a walk is usually about 45 minutes. That's a decent pace for walking, and we're definitely sweating when we're done. It's a good workout.

How to pass the time on long motorhome journeys

Motorhome journeys can be long and tedious if you aren’t driving and can feel like enormous wastes of time. Reaching the destination is exciting, but the route there is rarely so interesting. 

However, when you tweak your perspective and have a few great activities to keep you busy, the time will fly by.

Just a place to keep your stuff

The last few years it hasn't been that enjoyable for us to return to Canada. Sure, it's great to see family and friends again, but the majority of our free time had (and has) been taken up with dealing with Ruth's father and his possessions. 

I know, it's all part of life. But we'll just be glad when we can put this part of life behind us. And fortunately, we can see that happening on this trip.

It's going to be a busy week!

It's taking us a little longer to get used to the seven hour time change than it has previous trips. Despite going to bed at 10:30pm, we were still wide awake before 5:30am this morning. Maybe another couple of days and we'll be back on a normal schedule.

Yesterday we drove into the city to have lunch with my mom. 

Lots of work to do this week

We had stopped and picked up a few things on our way to the house on Friday night, but we needed to do a decent grocery shop. We were both awake really early because it'll take us a few days to get used to the seven hour time change. So we were able to head out right at 8:00am when the stores open to do some grocery shopping.

When we stay here, we usually drive into the town of Arnprior (pop 26,000) to do grocery shopping. It was pretty quiet at that hour on a Saturday morning.

We are back in Canada

Well that was a long day! But overall, everything happened according to plan and we are back at Ruth's father's old house in the village of Galetta near Canada's capital city of Ottawa.

Last we left you, we were at Frankfurt airport waiting to board our flight to Toronto. What a circus that was!

Not entirely stress free, but it all worked out okay

We dropped off Max at the dealer at about 10:00am Thursday morning and walked the two kms to the Dulmen train station. We travel light and we each had a small backpack and a rolling carry on suitcase. And even the carry on bags were half empty! They will be full when we return though.

Dulmen has only a small station and tickets are purchased only at a machine. There is nobody to talk to. We were concerned because I had read that morning that we were in the middle of a two day railroad engineers strike and only 25% of the normal trains were running.

We almost screwed up

We had our PCR test appointment in Winterswijk, Netherlands at 11:00am, so we got on the road early and headed for the huge Obelink camping gear store just outside Winterswijk. The store doesn't open until 9:15am, and we got there before it opened, so at the time Max was the first rig there.

At 10:00am, we set off for the 3 km walk to the downtown test center. By that time, there were quite a few other vans that had joined Max.

Getting ready to go

Apparently some people are having problems getting their email notifications from this blog. A couple of months ago, Google dropped that service from this platform, so I had to sign up to another provider. I chose follow.it and if you were previously signed up to receive email notifications, then that should have continued because I imported all the email addresses from the old program. 

If you're not receiving them, all I can suggest is to go to the follow.it website and login using the email address you signed up for and double check your settings.

Highest we've been for a while!

And no, we didn't smoke anything!

Yesterday, we made our way to the town of Schapdetten to a really great overnight spot in a green space separating farmers fields. And located only a short walk to the Baumberge Forest.

Wandering around Sendenhorst

Just a quiet day yesterday. We said goodbye to friends Dave and Bonnie, and hope to see them at some point when we return this winter.

We only drove about 18 kms (11 miles) to our next location at the town of Sendenhorst (pop 13,000). We weren't there for any particular reason, but they had a free motorhome overnight parking area with dump station so it was convenient.

Propane, water, electricity!

Propane is a common headache for motorhome travelers in Europe. The reason is that there are no agreed upon standards between the countries for propane tanks or fittings. Here, they are not called propane tanks, they are called "gas bottles".

I'll use our situation here in Germany as an example. 

Always fun to meet up with our traveling friends!

On Friday, we did what we think was our longest daily drive since we've had Max. It was about 80 kms (50 miles) to get back down to the town of Telgte to meet up with friends Dave and Bonnie!

We arranged a meeting spot at a municipal parking lot in Telgte that has specific sites for motorhomes, with coin operated electricity and water available. 

Seven more sleeps

One week from today, we arrive back in Canada. We aren't necessarily looking forward to actually being in Canada, but we're always excited about the travel itself and it's been ten months since we have seen family and friends located there.

Yesterday, I did more planning for the trip. Yes, the hotel in Dusseldorf is booked. The flights are booked. Our car rental when we arrive is booked. But one more thing needed to be looked after.

We ended up at a great spot

A few days ago we had mentioned to each other that it's been really different for us the last month or so not being on a schedule of any kind. I guess to a certain extent it's been like that all winter, but at that time we were booking week long Airbnb stays at most locations and it's a different feeling when you're in a motorhome and it's easy to just pack up and move on when you want to without any limitations.

And most of the time, it's been really quite easy to find free overnight spots. We were a little worried that with RV sales and use at record highs due to Covid, it would be difficult in the middle of summer. 

From plan A to plan B to plan C...

People are starting to travel again, so I wanted to remind you to check out Heymondo for your travel medical insurance. Travel with Kevin and Ruth readers save 5% by clicking through this special link.

Yesterday was another interesting day, but it's the first time that our overnight choices didn't really pan out. From plan A to plan B to plan C!

How to build a cruise ship. Visit to the Meyer-Werft shipyard!

Well that was an interesting day!

A few days ago, I had been searching for possible future overnight spots and came across one listing that said you could overnight in your motorhome and visit the cruise ship factory. That piqued my interest, so I did some more research.

The next thing you know, I'm online booking us two tickets at €12 ($17.75 CAD, $14.25 USD) per person to do the Monday 1:00pm self guided tour!

We are back in Germany

Netherlands was interesting and we're glad we went, but it's not a country that "wowed" us. We plan to return one spring in a future year in order to see the city of Amsterdam and the tulips. Otherwise, we would not purposely return there to spend any length of time.

It rained again yesterday morning and we didn't leave the little campground until almost 2:00pm. We then headed for the border, and the German town of Rhede.

All we could do was shrug our shoulders and laugh!

Last night I posted our first full month of expenses traveling Europe in Max the motorhome. You can view it here if you haven't seen it yet.

Things are a little damp here in Northern Netherlands! It has been raining every day for the past several with a few sunny breaks in between the downpours. We spent the morning inside the motorhome waiting for a period when the rain looked like it was going to stop long enough for us to get a walk in.

Touring Europe can be expensive. But not if you have your own motorhome!

And we've been looking forward to showing you just how inexpensive it can be to tour Europe in a motorhome.

July of 2021 is the first of many months for us touring Europe in the years ahead. So, here's our expense report for the first month of our extended European RV touring.

We spent a total of $1,523 CAD ($1,220 USD, €1,029) in the month of July.

What a great little campground!

We were getting low on fresh water, and the holding tanks were getting full so I started looking for somewhere to take care of that business. 

I had found a listing of a small campground that got great reviews. It was only €8 ($12 CAD, $9.50 USD) per night, and that price included electricity and WiFi. No showers or toilet, but we have our own so that's okay. 

And when I read their website, I was sold!

Pleasantly surprised by Groningen. Lots of interesting architecture!

We had pretty much had enough of cities, and so we were actually going to bypass the fairly large (pop 200,000) city of Groningen. 

But we had to go to the outskirts to get one of our propane tanks filled, and once we were there we realized it was only a 2.5 km (1.5 mile) walk to the downtown area.

How do we find great overnight locations in Europe?

A reader asked yesterday how we find our overnight locations here in Europe. 

With regards to the Netherlands in particular, we had been warned that it was tough to find decent free camping spots, and that paid camping is expensive. And while both of those things are true to a certain extent, we haven't found it that difficult. In fact, we've been here for over three weeks and have only spent €42 ($62 CAD, $50 USD) on four paid nights. The rest have all been free.

So, how do we do it?

A long driving day!?

Well, not really. But the longest one for us in quite a while! We actually did 70 kms (42 miles) yesterday!

But because we take the back roads, and we stop to see what there is to see along the way it took us a couple of hours to get to where we were going. 

Wandering around Harlingen, Netherlands

Harlingen is a small coastal city (pop 16,000) with a lot of canals and waterways within the city itself. It also has a big port that hosts the ferries that go to the West Frisian Islands, and is where several world class tall ships races have taken place.

We found a big free parking lot outside of town, and walked in.

You can't see everything

We spent three months in Albania, a country about the size of the state of Vermont. And we still didn't see everything we wanted to. 

Netherlands is one and a half times larger than Albania and we've been here for three weeks now. No way will we see everything there is to see. 

Sneek is worth a visit!

They were calling for rain later Saturday evening and overnight, so we figured it would not be a good idea to remain parked where we were beside the canal in low lying grass that might get muddy. So we packed up Max and moved on to the nearby small city of Sneek (pop 34,000).

And we're glad we did... Sneek is worth a visit!

Talking about our plan for this winter

We knew we weren't driving anywhere on Friday, so we took our time in the morning and it was almost 11am by the time we went out for a walk. I thought the bike trail was going to follow the water, but it ended up in between farmers fields with hedges so there wasn't much of anything to see. 

Still, we did 6 kms (3.7 miles), in an hour, so not a bad pace.

Just smile and wave

When we woke up Thursday morning, we were already located at the entrance to a nature reserve. So it only made sense to do the 5 km (3 mile) circular walk before we left.

I feel like we haven't been getting enough exercise lately, so I was trying to pick up the pace to get a half decent workout in, but this conflicts with Ruth wanting to stop and see everything along the way. So it's a bit of a balancing act sometimes as we try to keep each other happy!

The most beautiful place in the Netherlands

On Wednesday we drove over to the village of Giethoorn, located in Weerribben-Wieden National Park. 

The mostly car-free village has many thatched roof farmhouses built in the 1800's on small peat islands separated by narrow canals and connected by 170 small bridges. It's really pretty, with lots of walking paths, and the popular thing to do is rent an electric boat to tour the canals.

Almost feels like we're on holiday!

Tuesday's goal was to find a place to do laundry. We were only a couple of kilometers to the town of Vollenhove, and there is a big holiday park there that has a motorhome parking area, and apparently a laundry. The reviews didn't mention prices, other than saying "very affordable" which means different things to different people.

There is also a municipal motorhome parking area that has a dump station and fresh water fill. We parked there, and we were surprised that we were the only ones.