2 for 1

That is two days discussed in one post cause I got distracted yesterday and didn't write anything. Yesterday was a fairly normal day, we motored on in the cold for a few hours through a variety of bridges and locks, almost to the top of this part of Holland.  We stopped on a lovely dock on a small lake, the Amstelmeer, which was certainly peaceful.

Chuck and I managed to find a trail that was off the road and allowed dogs, so that was lovely, we got a good long walk in. 

It was lovely and also lovely to get off the roads, they drive super fast down these narrow roads here.

Only problem was ticks, I found one crawling on my sweater and five on Chuck.  Ho hum.

Oh, and there was also the guy who stopped on the side of the road, not 50 meters ahead of me as I was walking steadily towards him, went round his truck to stand directly in front of me at the side of the road and whipped it out to have a pee. By the time he got organized and started peeing, I was probably 20 meters away, and I had to wait in front of his truck for him to finish cause there was too much traffic to go round the truck and he was standing peeing in the way. (????!!!!!!?!?!?!?!???!!) WTF?

Anyway, this morning X took Chuck for a walk so I could hop on my bike and ride up to the dike that looks out over the sea, but here it is a bird sanctuary and looks fascinating on the chart.  See?

Well, it was again wonderful to be on my bike, I went past some fields of tulips... One of the real reasons to come to North Holland this time of year.

Rode on to the edge of the sea viewed from the dike, and it looked like, well a beach and the sea.  Probably depends on the state of the tide.  There was a bird watching hide constructed there and with, literally kilomètres of dike to chose from, someone put this post right in front of it.  Really.

Honest to goodness, why?

Anyway, rode back to the boat, saw these two coming back from their walk,

Rode out the dock back to the boat,

So then we were off again, we decided to skip Den Helder, the military port, it didn't look interesting enough for the price and headed down the Noordhollandkanal.  We're now in a little town called 't Zand, which is cute, I guess. Chuck was pretty annoyed with us at the beginning of today's trip as he was made to stay below due to rain. Once it eased off, he came on deck.  You can see he enjoyed the views.