Netherlands

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Same mill as two posts earlier, different time of day, same week en route to a workout at the gym…

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These are all of Erasmus Park, a smaller park which is mostly on an island created by – you guess it – the Erasmus canal. All taken on the 7th of January, one of the first reasonably sunny and clear days we’d had for several months. Below and right you’ll see the standing water which, there and other parts of town, is still standing. Everything feels waterlogged and muddy, even now when the rain hasn’t been quite so constant… :-/

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More lovely members of the narcissus family blooming next to Hortus, A’dam’s centuries-old botanical garden, in early March.

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Then there were these hardy early-January bloomers, in a patch of daffs that lasted from end of December or early January right up to a week or two ago before fully ending their bloom – in the process surviving snow and a freeze or two.

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When I resumed posting last week, I started with daffodils photographed several weeks earlier, on March 7 on my way to work. Then, biking home from two lovely hours of doubles with friends late on Tuesday the 2nd of April…what should my eyes see but this lovely patch of flowers (are these daffodils? jonquils? something else?) lit by the late-evening sun.

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Spot the island in this image from a mid-January morning 🙂

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Yes, we’ve shown you this dramatic maritime museum before, and by night as well. It really does stand out when one’s walking over to the Muziekgebouw for a concert, as was the case here in early March, during (brother) Steve’s latest visit.

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The quaint and historic eastern-Netherlands town of Zutphen on the Ijssel, where I spent last weekend playing lots of tennis in my first-ever “tennis camp” weekend with lessons and matches. Great fun and nice to get away for a bit.

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Welcome back, dear readers. One or two of you have reached out to double-check that all’s well in my world. Truth to tell, it’s been a hard slog of a winter season / past six months in both life (A’dam really can get grim, wet, and windy in the winter months) and work. But there are moments of joy always, and this captures one of my finer bike rides to work recently. Imagine, if you will, the contrast between this and biking home into the wind and rain at the end of the same day. Which is a thing that has been known to happen more than one could wish, lately. I’ll try to get back to dailies soon, if not immediately.