My friends Rob & Marijke have a passion for sailing and spend much of their free time on a beauty of a sailboat, called "Jelle" (after a name in Marijke's family). It was very nice to spend time with them during this visit. I stayed over for the night at their place and the next morning (yesterday) the sights of their house across from the house I grew up in on the Palestrinalaan were just too tempting to not snap another few photos of. It was a beautiful place to grow up ...
I had another day of memory lane on the bicycle through my old home village of Bilthoven and above is a bike lane tunnel ("Het tunneltje" = the little tunnel) under the train line which crosses the village. It leads to the tennis club where I pretty much lived during the summers of 1971, 1972 and 1973 (when I was 15-16-17 years old and thought I would be the next Bjorn Borg, one of the top professional tennis players of those years; I peaked at 17 and it all went downhill from there with my tennis career).
This small membership club has (and always had) ten clay tennis courts and a nice small clubhouse. Clay courts were always my favorite: the slower court for the slower fellow that I am. And you have no idea how many hours during countless summer days I spend hitting balls at this practice wall. If I would get a dollar for each hour I spend with that wall, I would be a rich man ...
The tennis club is located in a nice forest area surrounded by a trailer camping ground and in the past also with an outside public regular swimming pool with a simulated lake kind of shallow pool with beach type sandy areas around it; a place where I spend a lot of time as a young kid and where I learned to swim (for the final level swim diploma they made us jump into the deep end with all our clothes on and then we had to swim 25 meters to the other end). The pool disappeared and instead there is now a small golf course with a fancy driving range. The golf course only has a few holes of short distances and - from what I saw - the average age of the players is around 80; clearly targeted to the retired babyboomers living in town ...
One of my old high school friends, Richard, invited a few of us for drinks at his place yesterday and here he shows me a nice photo of his four kids (ages 25 to 32). Unfortunately, two of our buddies had to call in sick, so it was just Richard, Paul and me who went for a dinner in a nearby restaurant. Lots of good memories and reflections that evening ...
And today in the morning again on the train to the city of Nijmegen - in the eastern part of Holland - to visit Monique and her family (the oldest daughter of my sister Gerrie). Monique is 51 and completed studies in architecture and nursing and worked in Rumania (volunteering in an orphanage), Kosovo (as a medic with the UN Peace Keeping forces) and Malawi (two years as a consultant in a countrywide HIV-AIDS prevention program). With her husband she cycled from Holland through Europe, Turkey and Iran to Uzbekistan. After all that excitement, they had three kids (now 15, 12 and 9). Talking about an energetic (or some people would say exhausting) life. At their house they have made a climbing wall, because they are all into that sport. Her husband Marco runs a travel business called "selfdrive4x4" offering adventure vacations in southern Africa. They took Gerrie and Bert earlier this year for a twee week camping trip through parts of Botswana.
No comments:
Post a Comment