Sunshine and showers

According to both my phone weather aps all the rain we've had over the past couple of days never happened. At Erik's on the bank holiday monday, we went to Bussloo Strand, a lake with a beach for a bit of a swim and after a lovely swim on a hot and sunny day, followed by a nice cup of coffee, the black clouds descended and everyone, us included calmly walked back to the cars and sat in a traffic jam to leave the park while the wind and rain lashed the cars, the lightening flashed and the rumbles took a reassuring few seconds before we heard them.

The calm before the storm.

The evening before, I caught the train up to Erik's, it went like clockwork in a crystal maze kind of fashion, I eventually found somewhere at the station to lock up my bike that didn't have a sign on it saying "don't lock your bike to this fence or it will be removed" then found a tunnel entrance under the old bus and train station that now resembles a ruin about to be building site strewn with broken concrete and plant machinery. Through the tunnel to the machines that don't let you pay with a foreign card, I found I had pretty much exactly enough change to load up the card to travel to Apeldoorn, and found an earlier train than I'd planned and got straight on a direct train to Apeldoorn. Toby texted me to see if I could skype to say night to the kids and I thought hmmm, some trains have wifi...so I opened up my laptop, found a wifi called unsurprisingly "wifi op de trien" and we skyped!

Once I got to Erik's we sat out on their balcony until it had been dark for quite a while and then drunk even more rose and chatted on the sofa until the small hours. 

It was a lovely couple of days at Erik's. While I was there, I got a message from the Cambridge Raincoat company saying they are sending my raincoat to Mark's place, it's more than likely that a drout and heatwave will coincide with the arrival of said raincoat. Today both the aps on my phone that are supposed to predict the weather, didn't predict an our or so of persistent rain that fell while Jose, Martine and I shared a couple of cups of tea and coffee under a parasol outside the ledig erf. I've not seen either of them for a very long time as Jose's husband is Scotish so usually when I'm in Holland they are in Scotland. As is always the case with old friends, we chatted away as if it hadn't been 14 years since I left the whole flat Martine and I shared to her, more like a few months. We filled each other in on our lives today, and our new loves and new challenges. Again, how things change and still stay the same.

I visited two apartments today, neither really have potential, certainly not in the same way as the first one has had - one was very central but on the expensive side and only until the beginning of October. I suggested that it may be a way to dip our toes and move with no notice period to return if it didn't work. Toby didn't like the idea of having to move twice so soon, which was fair enough. The other flat was a good size, more central but the place was more expensive and nowhere near as nice as the Lamerislaan. It was really good to have had the opportunity for two more viewings, so not a waste time by any means.