Finding Sunny and Al Lagarde to Steenwijk - Netherlands September 4

"We'll be  north of Kampen and south of Sneek and that's all we know right now".  With a complete understanding of what they meant and and the difficulty we all face in pinning down our potential whereabouts when travelling by boat, we punched instructions firmly into the GPS, and set off in search of Sunny and Al.

We had intended to phone them for further directions when we were somewhere north of Kampen but we were not to know that at the end of a six-hour drive across four countries, which commenced substantially later than we would have liked, in a car substantially more uncomfortable than we would have liked, in traffic substantially heavier than we would have liked, that the roaming function on our phone would substantially absent itself?   Interestingly we could receive messages but not send any form of outward communication, which left us wondering whether the best strategy would be to find a cafe and sit there for long enough for someone to become worried, or at least curious as to our whereabouts, at which time, perhaps they'd phone to enquire about our health.

But we were now in Holland, a place where in contrast to that from whence we had come, things are ordered, cleaned and ritually tidied, and where if the person one is addressing in English does not understand, he or she will know someone who does, so we pressed on with fingers crossed.  Besides, our hosts were not the worrying kind, and in fairness to them probably had the utmost faith in our ability to find a needle in a haystack.

To be even fairer Al had narrowed the search area somewhat in an email which had been received but not opened by the time of our delayed departure, and it wasn't long after finding it that we found ourselves driving around the waterways of Steenwijk.  

With almost no fuss at all we found a familiar blue boat with a Canadian flag flying from its stern, made ourselves at home and settled in to swap stories as though this was the last time we were going to see each other for another two weeks.   Which if all goes to plan, is exactly the case.