Lavender, books, bed and a hot tub!

Well, after meandering for 2,000 KM through Washington and Oregon, we just found the best B & B anywhere!
We tried other islands...
We tried the coast, the valleys, the foothills...

We stayed in lovely places with gorgeous views or in fun locations.
But, until now, we had not found a place on 5 acres, surrounded by glorious flowers and rows of lavender. A place that has kingsize beds, memory foam no less! A hot tub on the deck... AND it is under $100 per night, including breakfast.


Maybe you guessed it?
We are home again! :-)
At Between The Covers Booklovers' B & B we really do live in paradise. I picked strawberries and even a few early raspberries from the garden today. Hummingbirds came to drink when I watered the veggies.
The ducks and chickens happily waddled around the garden tonight.
We just brought a basket of muffins, homemade granola, yogurt with organic strawberries and cantaloupe to our guest. I'd love to stay here, too! :-)

O wait, I can. But I DO have to do all the weeding.

If YOU would like to stay here, check out: www.betweenthecoversbandb.com
or join us on Facebook: Between the Covers, Booklovers' B & B

Amazing Race Drenthe

The famous hunnebeds, 5000 year old graves.

If you are planning a hiking or bicycling trip in the Netherlands, and there’s no better place to do either, you should join this organization: Vrienden Op De Fiets (Friends On Bikes): http://www.vriendenopdefiets.nl/nl/ (or .en for the English version).

This fabulous network across the country offers accommodations in private homes, much like B&B’s, but at a cost of E19 p.p.p.n. including breakfast. Accommodations are typical Dutch hospitality. No need to reserve long in advance, depending on the time of year, you can often phone the day before. Rooms can vary from a simple spare room to your own whole cottage. We’ve always had clean rooms, comfortable beds and a great breakfast. But - you can only arrive on foot or by bike. If you rent a car, you can’t use this organization.

Annual membership fee is 8 euros and that includes the complete catalogue of 5,000 addresses and contact information.

A traditional sailboat

After having walked some 60 KMs this week, from village to village, we have arrived in Appelscha, Friesland. This is just across the provincial border. 

Lucky for us because not only does each region here have its own dialect and culture, it also has its own speciality foods. 

Now we enjoy Frisian sugarbread (gooey bread with lumps of sugar baked into it) AND Drents raisin bread (weighs as much as a brick). 

Not only do the Dutch brew Heineken and Grolsch, they also produce many local beers ranging from dark to blond to fruity. 

Kees is happy. For this weekend we found a place to stay 2 nights, basically for the same price as the Friends On Bikes network plus dinner. The hotel had a special super deal that includes an elaborate breakfast and dinner. Since the forecast was for rain, we decided to stay in one place for two nights. 

Instead of walking tomorrow’s section of the Drenthe Pad, we rented bicycles. The Dutch have state of the art bicycles, including tires that will not pop anymore. Cost for a full day bike rental is 7 to 8 euros. We cycled through the village, across farm fields, national nature reserves, forests, a wild bird sanctuary and historic fields of peat moss. No less than 60 KM! Now, in addition to sore backs and feet, we also have sore butts and knees....

Drawbridge

Halfway it started to rain. We donned our rain capes - thank goodness we did not carry them for 2 months without ever needing them! I never felt more Dutch than pushing the peddles across a windswept bike trail through the fields.

The region's bicycles trails.

Those bike trails are amazing. Our route for today looks like this: 60 - 65 - 72 - 73 - 79 - 91 - 84 - 65 - 60. Sounds like a secret code, doesn’t it?

Riding from number to number.

But it’s all you need to find your way across the country. It’s a mind boggling system of (mostly) paved or concrete bicycle trails. At an intersection you will see a small sign with a number, either the number of the path you are already on, or pointing to the next number you need to follow. Simple. Just don’t miss one. At major crossroads there is a large regional map showing you all the routes so that you can easily change or adapt the route you are on.
Ingenious.

And the best part is that most bicycle paths are away from roads or other traffic. Just you and nature. It’s a system of hiking and biking trails that the Netherlands can be proud of. And that more countries should adopt.

Welcome to Tomorrow!

Today we arrived down-under, in the land of Oz, in the southern hemisphere... In the land where spring is fall, north is warm and south is colder... And where they drive on the left side of the road to boot.

The more I read, before coming here, the more I learned about vicious snakes, poisonous spiders and killer crocodiles. We'll try to avoid them all in the next three months.

We had an uneventful flight. 16 hours. And now we are in Sydney, in The Rocks - the old cobblestone part where white people first landed. Actually, the Dutch 'found' Australia about a hundred years earlier but took one look and decided it was an empty wasteland. They didn't even bother to claim it. Then the French and the British king played monopoly with really places and the English won. But they decided to use Australia as a dumping ground for their criminals: the Rocks is where the first settlers landed.
Now, if the deadly insects and animals don't kill you, the prices will. The skytrain from the airport was just a few stops but cost 17.- per person one way. We walked by a bakery with little, tiny pastries in the window: 15.- dollars each. But the people are cheerful, the sky is blue and the beer is plentyful. Enjoy staying in the same hotel where we stayed 13 years ago: http://www.australianheritagehotel.com/ It's a fun pub with a few rooms upstairs. Not much has changed, the paint is still peeling and the floors creak a bit more. But Sydney itself seems much more touristy and crowded. Tomorrow we take a ferry across the water to explore the Manly Beach area.

Now all we need to do is learn to drive on the wrong side of the road before picking up our camper.

A Vancouver B & B experience

Vancouver B.C. is a gorgeous city, in as far as cities can be gorgeous. Usually I stay with friends but this time we needed a different place to stay. I spent many nights googling for just the right spot. Didn't want to spend a fortune but wanted a clean place in a good location that offered:
a) a kingsize bed
b) free parking and
c) free wifi.

I find that often the cheaper hotels (Motel 6 up to Best Western) offer free wifi but the high end hotels charge more for wireless in your room. I refuse to pay extra for wireless...

Free parking turned out to be non existing in Vancouver - costs ranged from 15.- to 25.- per night extra to park your car in their garage.
Kingsize beds are hard to find in this kingsize city - at least in any hotels that are under 200.- per night.

After perusing Travelocity, Travelzoo, Booking.com and sites like this, I started from google maps - focused in on downtown and told it to "search nearby". I found a B&B that had the answers.
Check out: http://www.granvillebb.com/ 
Granville B&B is a gorgeously renovated mansion right along Granville (and 35th ave). The house was sufficiently sound proof not to hear the traffic too much, although we had a room in the back. Not sure how noisy the front rooms are.
Beautiful, high end furnishings and decorations. No costs were spared when building this home: deep tub, his and hers sinks, beautiful bedding, white fluffy towels. Everything spotless.
And while there was lots of privacy (you receive a code to get in when you arrive) the lack of personal contact was a bit.. well.. impersonal. It's more like a hotel than a B&B.
Breakfast was nice but meagre: juice, good coffee, choices of cereals and fruit. One slice of french toast. OK but not the abundance that one might expect at $125.- per night.
But with parking included this was one of the best deals, in a comfortable, clean environment, that I could find in Vancouver.

Smart Travel Tip: coming from mild Salt Spring Island, we did not have a windshield scraper in the car but found a frosty car outside . Using a credit card type card (I used my library card) works wonders to get ice from the windshield!