Royal Deventer

Our pilgrimage Itinerary titles today as the day of "A Bridge Too Far;" Unfortunately due to the downpour, we drive by John Frost Bridge and take an extended coffee break, but I am getting ahead of myself. The morning includes two Remembrance Ceremonies, one at Reichswald Forest Cemetery for members of the Airforce and the other at Holten Cemetery. I am scheduled to lay the wreath at Holten Cemetery, but before we get there, we travel into Germany to honour fallen airmen ...

... Regiment are well represented and I spot a familiar name: Cronshaw. Then I recollect having lunch with my friend and colleague Sandy Cronshaw in the staff room at our school. When I told her that I hoped to be participating in this pilgrimage, she told me " I have an uncle buried over there." So this must be Sandy's uncle, I think to myself. Soon there is a little gathering of pilgrims around Uncle Charlie's grave and it turns out that our fellow pilgrims ...

... farming communities on the German border, where things were slightly better. Dad used to tell us the story of when a bomb fell on the zoo. Opa cycled over there and came back with a chunk of the elephant's trunk, which they ate for a week. It was somewhat stringy, I believe.

Anyway, Dad was a thin and skinny thing, in danger of starving to death, so my Oma and Opa cycled all the way to Hengelo from Utrecht, in search ...

The cashew nuts were in a huff with me, after their earlier failure to give adequate directions. They folded their nutty arms and refused to tell me when to change motorways. I ended up back-tracking through a small village with no useful signposts, and some locals who waved every time we drove back past them looking for the way out. The cashew nuts smirked at me.

It was quite late by the time we got to Sander and Renata's farmhouse on the outskirts of Hengelo. It is a lovely ...

... Church and the still functioning windmill. The Mill offers expert tours of the technologies and importance of the mill. Just across the street is a splendid museum that displays excellent geological samples collected, chiefly of the glacial erratics collected... The area is quite lovely, and the elevations of the town are built upon ...

This is Zwolle, my new home. I wanted to share a few pictures of the town with you guys and show you how pretty it is. The city is beautiful- plenty of good architecture and flowers everywhere. I love the brickwork on some of these buildings.

... very regulated apparently it is illegal to put your washing out on the street side of the house!!!!! We have been for walks in the Sonsberg? park which is only a block or two away, its huge has lots of tracks through it ponds creeks etc, being spring here there are ducklings and goslings all over the place, fallow deer in the deer enclosure ...

... they believe are the right ones, they lead us to explore the options and decided for ourselves. It is great! I love being challenged in school and this is the first time I have had a class that makes me think and challenges me in that way. I am looking forward to having that class again. Also, the first day I made a real impression on the class and professors. I was one of three people to speak most of the period. When one of the professors asked another ...

... also understand most dialects of German, since it is similar to Dutch. Housing in the Netherlands is very expensive. Barbara's guidebook indicates that there are, on average, 368 people per square metre, making housing a prime concern in a country that is only 200 km from east to west and 300 km from north to south and has a population of half that of Canada. Thijs and Barbara live in a very small rowhouse, about 14 ft wide and 55 ft long on the main floor ...

... to pick up supplies for the journey. Some of the pilgrims decided that they really didn't like boat travel, so they stayed behind a built a humongous church with capacity 10x the population at the time! Here is a piture of the church from the Fort of Leiden where the population of the City withstood a 131 day siege against the Spanish ending in 1574. The relief of the siege of Leiden is still celebrated on October 3. A ...