Sophie Takes It Down

Today, we had our first BBQ and poker party of the year.

Luckily, this whole week, we had wonderful weather. A lot of our friends came to our place for some good times, good drinks, good meats, then some good poker!

Unfortunately, neither Margreet nor I made it to the money. However, Sophie beat Sasha heads-up for the big prize :)

Below are some of the nicer pics. Click here for the rest of the pics.

Liberation Day 2008

So we've been home for over a week now and we're almost all completely over jet lag. Noa has been sleeping the whole night (more or less) for the last 2 nights and we're all back to the same old routine, except for me, that is, as I'm starting to look at various career moves - but that's for another post.

Every May 5th here in Holland, they celebrate Liberation Day. There's no real Independence Day here as there is in the US, since I'm not aware that Holland declared independence from anyone (I might be corrected here). In fact, as a former colonial power, there are probably many countries that celebrate Independence Day from Holland!

So the closest thing we have here is the day Holland was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the combined armies of the US, Canada and the British after a 5 year brutal occupation.

The sad thing is that although it is a national holiday, you only get an extra day off every 5 years. It falling on a Monday this year meant that we had to celebrate it on Sunday, which we did. On a warm and sunny day, Margreet and I strapped Noa in the car seat and drove the hour and a half to Den Bosch in the south of Holland, where Margreet's older brother Freek (pron. Frake) lives with wife Helen and daughter Hannah.

We saw a funny thing along the way to Den Bosch. We passed a US military convoy. This convoy, however, was made up of a military jeep and half a dozen motorcycles, all dated back to WWII and manned probably by Dutch collectors. On the lead jeep waved a large US flag. In fact, all over the country, you could find people waving or planting US, Canadian and British flags on Liberation Day. Very nice to see that over 60 years after liberation, the Dutch are very grateful to these countries.

In Den Boshch, we met Margreet's whole family (including 5 of the 6 granddaughters), sat on the patio, chillin', drinkin', playing a little football (uh, I mean soccer?), running after all the children, then had a nice chinese dinner. I was quizzed on whether I knew all 12 of the Dutch provinces, and with a little help from Margreet's mother, Riek, I did pretty well :)

We made a couple of nice photos of the family day out.

Click here to see the rest of the photos from that day.

Cost of Gasoline - part 2

Funny thing, just days after the previous post where I compared the price of gasoline in the US to what we pay here in Holland, I read an article which compares the price of gasoline in about 150 countries.

Damn, I had to move to the country with the 5th highest cost in the world! I should have moved to Venezuela!

Here is the link to the article.

Cost of Gasoline and Cost of Our Trip - part 1

We've been back for a few days now and we're still not recovered from the jetlag.

I think that if it were just up to Margreet and I, we would have been over it already. Unfortunately, Noa still wants to sleep in the day and play around at night. Hopefully, this will settle itself soon!

When I told people that we were doing a cross-country RV trip, quite a few people mentioned that they had always dreamed of doing this themselves. Indeed it was quite an experience, one we'll remember for a lifetime, but I thought I would mention the cost of doing so, as we way underestimated how much this trip was going to set us back (not to say we wouldn't have gone through with it).

Renting the RV - about $2400

We were lucky in this regard. The company we rented the RV from actually wanted the RV moved from New Jersey to Seattle, which was why we travelled the way we did. Originally, we wanted to go from NY to LA, but the other companies we contacted wanted over $5000, which included a good $2000-$3000 for a one-way drop-off fee. Since we were doing them a favor taking the RV to Seattle, they waived the one-way drop-off fee. How nice of them!

Gasoline (petrol) - about $2300

When I left the States in 2004, I remember the cost of gasoline reaching record highs of $2.30 a gallon or EUR 0.40 a liter (all conversions assume EUR 1.00 = $1.50). And not knowing that the cost of gasoline had gone up in the meantime, I planned the trip accordingly.

In reality, the cost of gasoline ranged from $3.20/gal (EUR 0.56/l) on the East Coast to $3.90/gal (EUR 0.68/l) on the West Coast. When you are planning a trip of over 5,200 miles (8,300 km) and you're driving a vehicle that consumes 8 mpg (3.4 km per liter), it tends to add up.

For those of you reading this in the US, let me tell you how much we pay for gasoline here in Holland. The cheapest gasoline here costs about EUR 1.50 per liter. That translates to$8.60 /gal. Think of that next time you complain about the rising cost of gasoline.

RV Site Hook Ups - around $550.

We didn't know how legal nor how safe it was to pull up along the side of the road, and to be honest, we didn't really feel like finding out. RV-ing is a common and popular pasttime in the US and you can easily find these RV parks in most towns and parks. In fact, a lot of them are quite nice. You can hook your RV up to electricity, water, sewer, and cable, and most offer free wi-fi (wireless internet). The state parks are often the worst, as they sometimes offer electricity and water. When we were in Ventura, we had nothing - which is OK, as the RV has water tanks and sizeable sewer tanks. Most places cost $25-$30 per night, but would be extra had we extra people or extra vehicles.

All told, we spent about $5200 on the rental, gasoline and RV hook-up fees.

This amount does not include the cost of food, airfare, entertainment, nor the costs resulting from our little accident, which set us back $1200. It's amazing how much a little dent can end up costing!