New Friends

One of the best things about travel

A few days ago Shannon was walking Bailey around De Heide Lake and a couple of things happened differently from normal. And how serendipitous. First, by chance she took a slightly different route from the usual one, and she and Bailey came across a man out with his dog. Second, instead of trying to say “good morning” in Dutch like she has been doing, she simply and for whatever reason just said “Good Morning” in English.

The man surprised her by asking “Are you from Wisconsin?” He recognized Shannon’s accent as being from the northern part of the US. His name is Jon and as it turns out, he’s from Oregon and has been living here for the last 50 years, just a couple of towns over. They got to talking and Surprise! - he and his wife Koosje (kind of like Kosher but with an “uh” instead of an “er”) were married on Orcas Island! (that’s like 10 miles from our home for anyone who doesn’t know). Talk about small worlds!

Fast forward a couple days - they invited us over to say hello, so we did a bike ride over today to do just that. And we got to see yet another route on bikes - this time by pasture lands, canals, small towns and another classic dutch windmill.

They live just east of Mildam (where the Ecokathedraal is that we mentioned on here a few days ago) in a small village of 600 people called Katlijk. It took us about 30 minutes to get there and we went right through the middle of Mildam (which looks like it’s about the same size as Katlijk).

There we met Koosje and had coffee in their backyard in the sunshine and talked about travels, both ours and theirs.

Jon and Koosje with their black lab Venja pronounced Venya.

And sure enough, time ticked away and soon we had to say our goodbyes - it was getting near play/feeding time for Bailey. But we vowed to stay in touch and said “we’ll see you again somewhere!” So here’s to new friends!