Hi all. Yes yes, they still exist: traditional family days! We had one yesterday with the family of my mothers side, and this one was combined with the sixtieth birthday of Willem, one of the uncles. The mission for a present was simple: the sisters (that's how we nephews and nieces lovingly call the mothers/aunts 'clan') had thought up the idea of making a birthday calendar and everybody was going to make a page, or month. My sister and I were in charge of June. We both decided to do a small text with fun memories of our uncle, completed with a small picture. My sister had made the first part en mailed it to me so I could finish the job. That was well finished within any deadline, accept for the printing part. My own printer hasn't been working for maybe two years now, so I needed to get my hands on a printer that would be able to print one hundred and twenty grams paper. At work the guys doing the maintenance on the printers was not that happy with the thought of me feeding one of the printers this thickness of papers, so my next guess was to print it in Katwijk on my dads laser printer. Wrong again, he was having troubles getting a nice printout sometimes as well, and I was only having one thicker paper. So I then set my hopes on my sisters printer wrote the document to memory stick and took it with me when I was picking her up to go to Amsterdam. As I got there their printer wasn't feeling o.k. either so we had to arrange a printer nearby and eventually found one at a friends and after a little stubble we finally had our print :-) So off we went to Amsterdam. For now I'll spare you the where-do-you-leave-the-car-all-day details but we barely made it to the first rendezvous point of the walking trip in Amsterdam, carefully setup by our anniversary uncle. Let me begin by saying that I really do like these family days, even though timing is sometimes bad. Through the rest of the year we hardly ever see the nephews and nieces so this is always a nice time to do some catching up. Normally, when there is no birthday plan, we just gather at one of the family's, everyone have a chat with everyone all day and somewhere in between is the unavoidable 'walk in the park' and I mean that literally ... This walk however can be skipped, but you'll have to come up with a good excuse ;-) They always set out to do a walk for about an hour and a half, but on more than one occasion it's been well over two and a half or even three hours! So yesterday was all walk, almost like a scenic tour of Amsterdam. I can take walking, it's not hard or anything ;-) But walking with a group of people means you're walking with different paces, waiting for everybody to catch up, etc. Back killing time, trust me. Man I was bust already at the first rest point, the ride over there in the Fiat not helping much for that matter. And at that point there was still plenty of walking to come. It was a nice tour. We did visit some nice parts of Amsterdam and eventually we came to an halt in a floating restaurant (it is Amsterdam of course, so plenty of water around) which was really nice. Very nice food and live music. The music part was extremely great, a flamingo group consisting of a guitarist, a rhythm guy, a singer and a dancer. Very nice, I loved that performance. Then it was getting about time to go home again, and my sister and I would need a couple of hours to do so. When I finally hit my bed it was a little over midnight ... ouch ... Right now I feel like I've been run over by one of them big American trucks ... twice ... oh boy. Let's make this week a nice and quiet one shall we? I need to be my old self again next weekend because then it is Le Mans time! Yeah! Have one on me,