15 Sep Goodbye summer, hello travel!

The rain starts pouring down. It’s getting colder. We long for new adventures, looking forward to spend time as a family. For us it are signs that another travel leg is about to begin: the ‘yin’ to our ‘yang’ of being in Holland, I wrote about that in the post about ‘landing in a new place: how do you do that?‘ But first it is time to share some gratitude for the summer we spend in Holland. It was an amazing time full of family visits and trips around the country. We spend it with friends and working with clients during our business bootcamp events. Isa and Vesper spend a large part of the summer at the kindergarten farm, making friends, speaking a lot of Dutch and ‘Twents“, helping to feed the animals and tending the land. Some highlights in this post, for those interested to read and follow our family adventure:

Family camping trip
We went to Heeg to spend a couple of days with friends, camping in a VW t2, the exact same model we own and that sits in Costa Rica waiting for our return: we hope to take Nina for a roadtrip with the kids in 2020, so getting a bit of practice is very welcome! Can we do it as a family? Sleep and live in the van with the four of us? Renting this van is a great way to experiment to see if we like it. It was great to see our long time friends again, have the kids spend time together. We came home far more exhausted than we arrived: lack of sleep, early morning rises and of course the not-so-occasional drinks until late 😉 but you know, who cares? We can always catch up sleep, not the time spend together. If you’d like to read more about how our experiment ended, check this blog.

Dia de los Muertos Zwerink Birthday Bash
Steven and his two brothers organised their birthday bash celebration this time in the theme of Dia de los Muertos. A Mexican national holiday usually celebrated in the beginning of November. But this party could have been in Mexico! All who joined made a real effort to look like Mexican death and celebrate the lives of those who are not with us anymore. It was just great, because it reminded us of the effort all of our family and friends took to join our Mexican wedding in Acapulco in 2013. This was again a great effort to join our love for Mexico (and party haha) For me, Diana, it was the first time in years I stayed at a party until 02.00am. It felt like we were back in our beloved Mexico 🙂

Business Bootcamp Week
One of the reasons for us to come back to The Netherlands every summer, is the opportunity to work with people, our clients, in a physical reunion. In June 2019 we organised a 5-day business bootcamp with our training company. We organised this edition in and around our mobile home at the campsite in Haaksbergen. Another experiment that turned out great! It was a beautiful experience to invite participants in our home, prepare food together and run a great entrepreneurship programme from that location. It looks like we will be using our mobile home as a training location in 2020 as well and we are thinking about some small remodeling to make it more apt for receiving people like this.

Vermeij family day: boating and windmills
Every summer we intend to spend a special family day with each of the families, which is great to spend some more quality time together and make new memories. This family day was also organised to celebrate the birthday of Diana’s dad, Jan. We spend a day at the famous Kinderdijk Windmills with Diana’s family. We took two small boats and boated there while eating some delicious snacks and drinking beers and sodas each of us brought. It is lovely to see how the kids react to so many windmills in a row: 22 windmills, some of which still operating to pump the water out of the canals. At the end of the day we enjoyed a dinner together. Great piece of Dutch heritage, very close to the village Diana grew up in.

Zwerink family weekend: playgrounds and pools
Stevens family organised a weekend together which we spend at a nice holiday park. A destination like this is great with young kids as there are many things to do: a park big enough to take a long stroll, many playgrounds, an outdoor water playground and indoor pools. Isa and Vesper and their nephew Dirk love to play together and ask granddad to read them stories, again and again ;-). We enjoyed each others company while the kids were around.

Summer at the farm kindergarten
One of the nice things about living in Haaksbergen, is that we have a beautiful kindergarten close by that is part of a farm. Isa and Vesper spend two seasons there, including the one of the summer of 2019. We wrote about Isa’s stay here before as it was an important reason to choose to live at camping Scholtenhagen in Haaksbergen. The kids help out in the barn, clean the stable, help feed the alpacas, chickens and the horse. Every morning the four pigs are freed from the barn to spend the day outside. It is a joy to see the kids learn how to take care of animals and tend to the garden. The bigger children have a small piece of garden to tend small plants. The tractor brings in hay fresh from the land and sometimes the kids are taken to another farm to see the baby cows that are just born. We just love this place!