Jon's Birthday in Friesland

As has been customary when it has come to birthday celebrations, this year we had to leave town to celebrate Jon’s birthday. So it was off to Holland and straight to Friesland (Home of the Friesian cow) to Poppenwier. Jon’s uncle has a place there and they were awaiting our arrival for a weekend of sailing (who would have picked that Jonny would want to so that for his b’day) and celebrating. We landed in Amsterdam Schipol, picked up our rental cars and headed towards Poppenwier. We arrived to the most amazing welcome which included a bowl of ‘Kiwi Cocktail’ upon our arrival and dinner all prepared and waiting for us. Anne (pronounced Orna), Guis (… I know the spelling is wrong and struggled with the pronunciation all weekend) and Hanna had gone to extreme efforts to make us all feel welcome and ensure that we were well fed and ‘hydrated’ for the duration of our stay. They had even set up flags on the deck with the nationalities of all of the people that they knew were in our group – amazing! All of this is no mean feet when you are descended on by 10 people in one hit.

In the morning Linda cooked us all pancakes and we set out eel traps in the canal for the great eeling competition. Each nation was in competition for the best bait concoction to pull in the slippery suckers. After setting out traps we made our way down to the boat yard where we picked up our 100 year old dutch boat and headed through the canal system to Lake Sneek. This was a blast... we navigated a lock before heading out on the lake where we spent the day eating, drinking, swimming and relaxing! We all came back with a bit of a tan as the day had been gorgeously sunny and incredibly hot.

When we returned from the boating we set ourselves up outside and then were able to pull up our eel traps. This was sooo funny, Guis had gone to a lot of trouble and we each had various ‘fish’ in our traps! Liz won the day with three vacuum packed eels while Jon and I were disqualified… he had tinned Sardines and I had vacuum packed trout… this was the beginning of our dinner as we opened up our appetisers.

That night we had huge thunderstorms and ended up taking our dinner over to the neighbours place and having dinner and drinks over there. When the weather cleared we headed back to the bach and promptly to the pub. Poppenwier is a small town and as you can imagine there were only three people in the pub until we arrived – I think it is fair to say that they thought we were mad and they sat back and watched as we sung Happy Birthday to Jon at the top of our lungs when the clock struck 12…. We had actually been at it all day as we were working on the theory that he was already a year older based on NZ time…

The night ended in typical Jason Matthews fashion with a trip to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning for a few (probably about 10-15) stitches in his leg… Cart wheeling down the street with the spearhead fences is not the best – particularly when you become impaled on one of them! The next day we packed up our bits and pieces and headed over to Crau for a drink and a wander through the village. Then the race was on to get back to the airport on time to catch our flight – Linda had lost her car keys so for a couple of the crew this meant ditching the car and catching a train to the airport. Jon and Paula only just made it to the check in on time and ended up on standby…. How were they rewarded for their tardiness???? Upgrade to Business Class on the way home thank you very much! Shane and I were not impressed and we squeezed our way back to cattle class with the rest of the minions! Oh well I guess it was his birthday...