From The Depths (Mima'amakim)

From the depths I called out to you
Come to me
Upon your return, the light will return to my eyes
I'm not finished, I'm not leaving the touch of your hands
May it come and light up to the sound of your laughter

From the depths I called out to you
Come to me
Against the moon that lights your way back to me
They spread out and melted against the touch of your hands

In your ears I whisper, and ask
Who's that calling out to you tonight? Listen up
Who sings out loud to you, to your window?
Who gave his soul so you'd be happy?
Who will give a hand and build your home?

Who will give his life, and put it beneath yours?
Who will live as dust beneath your feet?
Who will love you more than all other loves?
Who will save you from every living spirit?

From the depths...
From the depths I called out to you
Come to you
Against the moon that lights your way back to me
They spread out and melted against the touch of your hand
In your ears I whisper, and ask

-- Idan Raichel

New Noa Videos Added

I'm pretty embarrassed about how long it's been since my last post.

Believe it or not, I actually started writing 2 different posts, but never got them completed and posted. Our US trip just created such great blog fodder that I was finding it hard to write anything compelling enough.

I do have some great photos, videos and stories from a trip Noa and I took to Cornwall and Devon last month, except that they're stuck on my phone (the photos and videos, that is) and I can't find a way to download them to a computer. Hopefully, I'll get that done this century.

In the meantime, enjoy a few new videos taken recently of Noa.

And keep on checking the blog ...

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!

We're Home

Just a quick post to let you know that we've made it back safely.

From The Hotel Room at Seattle Airport

This will be the last post from the US.


We have returned the RV today (Friday), got a ride to a hotel right by the airport and we will be taking our return flight tomorrow lunchtime.


The hotel we're staying at is the Radisson and we love it. The shower has 2 flat showerheads, giving you a "surround-sound" drenching! We have free wi-fi (I love wi-fi and I love free!). The king size bed has a remote that adjusts the firmness/softness of your side of the bed! To be honest, I was playing around with it and couldn't feel much of a difference. Then Margreet laid down on her side and I played around with the right hand side controls and she complained that she didn't feel much anything either. But I was! So apart from the "L" controling the right side of the bed and the "R" controlling the left side, it's lovely!


We spent the night in Victoria, Canada with our friends John and Shauna. We had to take the ferry there and back, and Noa loved walking around the ferry, being showered with adoration by little old ladies which she completely ignored. John is the man responsible for Margreet and I meeting and has been setting up his life in Victoria after leaving Holland over a year ago. We miss his donations to our weekly poker evenings and my weekly thrashing on the squash court, but life moves on and friends move away. It was nice to catch up, John showed us his new practice and then around town, then they made us a nice spicy dinner. Hopefully we'll be able to see them again soon.


I took very few pictures in Canada. Just a few from the ferry.

Wild and Wacky Washington Adventures

Well, it's hard to believe that we've already accomplished 23 days of driving across America and that we're only a few days from returning home. Although we both enjoy being on vacation, we're both ready to no longer be on the road. These last few days have had us go through some very pretty Northwestern countryside, as well as a hair-raising adventure (for those with hair, of course).

After reaching Portland, we turned east again and drove up the Columbia river, for what turned out to be a very scenic drive. The Columbia river is a very wide and fast moving river flanked on both sides by hills covered with many trees (pine, I think). A railway runs alongside as well offering some postcard-looking views. Unfortunately and true to form for this part of the country, it was raining off and on for the last few days, so good pictures were hard to come by. But here are a few:

Then we veered North again and headed to Yakima, where my friend Tamara lives with husband Tim and adorable kids Jacqueline (5) and Nathaniel (2). Tamara was one of my first friends when I moved back to Ventura in the early 90's and it's great that we've been able to remain friends for so long through our countless moves. Now Tamara can run a clinic on hospitality. Every effort was made to make us feel right at home, including little pictures of us all over the guest bedroom to remind us who we were when we woke up. Seriously, nice touch :) Good cooking, good company, good times! If they didn't live so far, we'd be there every month!!! Unfortuntely, Tim was already at work when we got the cameras out and Noa wasn't cooperating:

After setting us off with a hearty breakfast, we drove toward the Seattle area over a few very high mountain ranges. Going up one very long hill, I was keeping an eye on the temperature gauge. Already going through the California desert a week earlier, we noticed the temperature going up and had to refill the car with coolant and water. This time, somewhere in the isolated hills between Yakima and Ellensburg, the needle was creeping up again as we were going uphill. I slowed down so that the engine didn't have to work so hard and the needle steadied, but was still close to high. Then it started climbing again and I wanted to pull over on this 2 lane highway, but there was only a narrow shoulder, just wide enough for the RV to park, but way too close to the right hand lane and trucks were coming by quick. So stopping here would be my last option.

Unfortunately, I ran out of options. The needle suddenly shot to the maximum and steam started pouring out from under the hood. If I didn't pull over onto the narrow shoulder, I would be stopping soon on the highway itself. I managed to pull the RV onto the shoulder, so that there was about a foot between the painted line denoting the edge of the right hand lane with the edge of the RV. Trucks and cars were going by very quickly and pretty close. I really didn't want to stay there too long. I opened the hood and opened the coolant reservoir (carefully) and since I had no more coolant, dumped some of our drinking water into the empty reservoir. We waited a little bit, then started the engine. Carefully continuing up the hill at low speed, the temperature was holding pretty steady, and so we continued slowly for the next 20 odd miles until we reached Ellensburg and bought some more coolant and filled up the reservoir properly. So far after another 200 miles (including uphill climbs) we haven't had a repeat, so fingers crossed!!!

Driving along the Interstate 90 between Ellensburg and Seattle goes quite high. We were basically driving right by ski slopes and snow was piled high by the sides of the road. Funnily enough, the ski slopes were closed despite there being tons of snow on them. Maybe season is over... Who knows!!! Unfortunately, the weather was rainy with low clouds, so we could not see Mt. Rainier and other tall mountains in the area. Would have been nice.

We didn't go into Seattle, rather around it and up the Olympic Peninsula. Tonight (Wednesday) we are in an empty RV site in Port Angeles, from where we will take the ferry early tomorrow morning to Victoria in British Columbia in Canada! Yeah!

California Cruisin'

I'm not saying this because I come from California, but California has to be the prettiest state in the country.

I haven't seen all of them. On this trip, we just entered our 14th (Oregon), but we've seen a nice sample already. California rules.

The last three days had us travelling up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) from Morro Bay to Santa Cruz, then up the Central Valley to Redding, then right by Mount Shasta to the Oregon border.

On Saturday, we drove up the PCH, a mostly one-lane highway following the contours of a rugged coastline. At times, it's very windy and steep, but the views are breathtaking. I have to admit that one corner, I took a bit a very sharp corner a little to narrowly and cheated over the yellow median line and was greeted with an oncoming biker with an adament one-finger-salute. I made my peace with biker nation when I was given the regular five-finger-salute as I pulled over and let a whole convoy pass later on. You know me, I'm down with the bikers :)






On Saturday night, we spent with my friend Nasser (or as we called him when we were younger, "friend-father"). He lived with us when I was a young boy (from the ages 6 through 10) and had an fatherly influence in my life well beyond just those years. He knew my mother very well and it was nice for Margreet to learn about my mother a bit and get a picture of my life as a kid (as my recollection is quite hazy). We also went through a lot of old pictures of my childhood, many I don't even recall seeing. Nasser is one of those people who has an uplifting affect on other people, and I can say that I always feel I have more positive energy after I visit him, and this time was no exception. Noa had a field day in his house and learned to climb up and down the 3 wide steps from his living room to his dining room, and just generally running around the place. Thanks for the nice stay, Nasser.



The next day, we drove from Santa Cruz to Redding, a full 300 mile drive that wasn't too exciting. However, toward the end of the drive, as we approached Redding, we could see the snow-capped Mt. Shasta looming large over the other moutains. The next day's drive would have us driving right by it.

Today (Tuesday), we headed north and uphill. Immediately, we were surrounded by mountains and lakes. Just beautiful. Interstate 5 runs just 10-15 miles west of the summit Mt. Shasta, which stands at over 14,000 feet. There was snow covering the whole of Mt. Shasta and the tops of many other mountains in the area. In fact, it snowed a few times while we were driving through as well.









Tonight we pulled into an RV camp just north of Eugene, Oregon. Tomorrow, we will stay with my friends Tamara and Tim, who I haven't seen in ages, then on Thursday we'll stay with our friends John and Shauna in Victoria, British Columbia who we haven't seen since they left the Netherlands last year.