Tuesday, March 25, 2008

White Easter


In the Netherlands, they have a saying for this time of year: "April, doet wat wil." April can do anything. This year, that's certainly applied for March. The weather varies from sunny to windy, stormy, hailing, sleeting and snow - a few times each day.

So it was an interesting Easter, to wake up on Monday morning to a mild blizzard.

We pottered off to Groningen to visit the fortified village of Bourtange on the German border. It's a random place to visit (because it's 3 hours away and there is not much to do once you've circum-nativigated it in 30minutes), but was a lovely weekend as we were joined by Mills's siblings.

We had a monster of an easter egg hunt on Sunday morning. We hid them in the garden around our self-catering bungalow (although Mills's sister chose to hide them in the neighbour's garden, which got a bit awkward when they opened their curtains). We did have a few artistic differences, as Mills and his family take great delight in hiding eggs as inaccessibly as possible, while I'm more a fan of keeping them in eyesight (in order to speed up the consumption process).
The view from our bungalow on Sunday...
...And then on Easter Monday.

Despite having to dodge a few hail/snow storms to stay dry, the weekend went smoothly. We had to trudge through the sludgy snow to get to work this morning, but at least we didn't get stuck in the massive traffic jams around Holland. Scroll down in this story to see the traffic report. The red bits are where traffic has come to a complete standstill. According to the news reports, there was over 800km of unmoving vehicles in the Netherlands... a country estimated to be three times the size of the Kruger National Park. Which is really not that big for that much traffic.

Included in the same story is this link, showing kids who found a patch of black ice on a road in Brabant this weekend. They claim to have phoned the authorities first... and then, with true journalistic ethics, hung around to film cars and bikes handling the unexpected slippery surface. With interesting results.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, the pictures are awesome, looks and sounds like you had a fabulous Easter!

We tried a new tactic for the Easter egg hunt this year: we made my hubby hide the eggs, so that he wasn't allowed to find them. This gave the rest of us (including parentals) a fair chance of finding something! That is if you managed to push your way passed Little Sis in her short pink skirt, high heels, and bunny ears who ran passed everyone before I had managed to explain to the rest of the family-in-law what was about to happen!
We thought of you!!!

Koekie said...

Ah, classic Tartface... I love it. :-)