Books are willing to wait. Jenny Erpenbeck
My book club meets today. It's both poetry day and the day we choose books for the coming year. Unfortunately, my exposure to poetry is limited to reading reviews in the New Yorker and listening to music lyrics. To actually sit and read a book of poetry, well that is something I just never do.
As to next year's book choice, I've taken a safe tack and chosen one I've already read. Last year I saddled the club with one of those big Russian novels I'd long wanted to read but hadn't gotten around to yet. This turned out fine, we read it and discussed it, but I've earned a bit of ribbing for the choice.
My scanning progress is currently at roll 42, or just over a thousand photos. Seeing as how I've been on a motorcycle theme here's one more. It's 1997 and we're at the tail of a tour of Holland when we caught this fleet of BMWs in a plaza in The Hague.
Back in 1998 we were in Maastricht where we visited Paul's aunt Maria who was a nun. She arranged Paul's adoption into the Schoemaker family. She lived at the Klooster van de Zusters Onder de Bogen (the Convent of the Sisters Under the Arches).
On seeing this photo (below) I thought it was Groningen because we climbed a similar tower there. But no, this is Delft and I know it because of the address on the side of the Smart car. The tower, or maybe it's a steeple, from which the photo was taken is the Nieuwe Kerk, the second tallest church in the Netherlands.
What looks to be a giant metal snail attached to a jetty of cement is the Balgstuw Ramspol, an inflatable rubber dam. The dam crosses the river that connects the Ketelmeer and the Zwarte Meer, and was built to protect the nearby villages against rising water in the Ketelmeer. It has three sections and takes about an hour to inflate.
Ten Post is a small town about fifteen km northeast of Groningen. Henk and Eric put us up while we were there and they gave us a tour of a church.
While exploring the Ten Post church we climbed up into the ceiling. There we examined the brick domes you see from the inside of the church. A conventional wooden roof protects the domes from the elements.
We took a bus from Groningen north to Lauwersoog, a small town on the North Sea, then we took a ferry to the island of Schiermonnikoog.
Today is election day in British Columbia. The premier called the election, or dropped the writ, on the 21st of September. He's gambling that his poll numbers will free him from needing an alliance with the Greens, and the prognosticators think he will, though we may not know the results for awhile.
Holding the election mid-pandemic squeezed out much of the time for campaigning because early voting took off in popularity. There used to be weeks for campaigning, then election day, counting of ballots, and then results announced. Now it's weeks of voting during the campaign, then election day (might be better named election deadline), and then some more weeks for counting of the ballots.
Update: early returns were such that, even with mail in ballots yet to be counted, it's projected that the premier got a comfortable majority.
Anyway, back to my imaginary travels. In the photo we're in Schermonnikoog and this is our hotel. We'd just got off the ferry. The hard-to-spell Schiermonnikoog is a small island in the North Sea (see the red dot in the map stolen from wikipedia), though the body of water one traverses to get there is called the Wadden Sea. The island is one of the Wadden Islands (Waddeneilanden). We found it to be green and flat and without much traffic. Good for biking.
We left Schiermonnikoog. We took the ferry to Lauwersoog, a bus to Groningen, and then the train to Leiden.
I like this style of bridge. I've only seen it in Holland so I associate it with the Dutch, but perhaps others use it too.
Regine graciously hosted us when we stayed in Leiden. Here we had lunch with her son and his partner.
I'm still imagining we're touring the Netherlands. Here we're in the charming town of Maastrich checking out an old water wheel that was once used to grind grain.
A church in Maastricht re-purposed as a book store.
In the center of Leiden is an 11th century shell keep, which is a type of fort. It's a round brick building and it's open to the public.
I think this will be the last photo from our 2007 Europe trip.
