Solex

John's family got me a solex tour for my birthday. A solex is a bicycle that has a motor on the front wheel that can be moved up or down. They were pretty popular in the 40s around The Netherlands. We went for a 3 hour tour around Assen, a small city to the south of Groningen. We got to wear period outfits: a long leather coat and helmet.

Getting ready to ride: Marcel, Cor, Me, John, Jane, Ilse.

Getting some instructions on how to ride our solex's: Me; Jane; Solex guy, Marcel, and Cor

Jane and Ilse brought along some food for a picnic along the way. It was super tasty and quite a lot of stuff to choose from.

Here we are riding the solex's:

ACK!!!! it's a flasher.


Close up of the solex motor. The left picture shows the handle that you use to lift the motor up and down. and on the right is a picture of the start / accelerator lever (under the start arrow).

We stopped for a candy bar break. L: Cor and Jane R: Ilse and Marcel

And Jane coming back to the solex place after the ride.

Joost's birthday

John's nephew, Joost, recently turned 5. One of his presents was pedal car. John helped Joost and his sister race around their yard. It looked like a lot of fun.

Weather over Groningen

The summer brought some rain to Groningen. It would be raining and sunny at the same time, and as a result, we had a lot of rainbows. A couple of times we even had full double rainbows. One storm had some weird clouds as well. This was the view from the front of our apartment looking over southeastern Groningen.

John's Birthday and our Housewarming Parties

Here are some pictures from our Housewarming and John's birthday parties. Now that our place is all remodeled, we were happy to have lots of people over. It's always great to celebrate with family and friends. It's also a good excuse for me to bake cookies and muffins :)

Uit Groningen-Moke

A couple weeks ago there was a free music festival in the city center to kick off the cultural season in Groningen. Moke, a dutch band, was one of the headliners. We managed to get up close to the band. Moke has a couple songs on the radio here, and it was super fun!

Here's a picture of the roadie. He was straight out of the 80s.

And some pictures of the band:

And here I am rocking out:

Dutch style camping

John's parents like to go traveling with their caravan. They spent a lot of time this summer traveling around Norway. After they got back they went camping in a local campground/resort. We went to visit and here's some pictures of a "typical" dutch camping experience. There were a couple differences between dutch camping and camping in my experience. There weren't any picnic tables or fire rings at the campsites. The campsites also seemed much more open and not very private.

Some other camper's "rigs". I like the double zip on rooms which seem to add a lot more space to the camper.

And this is John's parent's "rig". You can see his mom, dad, and John waving through the windows:

9K Bomenberend loop

Bomenberend is a local Groningen holiday. Sometime a couple hundred years ago Groningen was under siege by some Germans. Groningen withstood the siege and eventually the foreign invaders left on Aug. 28. This ushered in the era of the united Netherlands and the golden era of the 1600s. Ever since then Groningen celebrates this day. In more modern times, this celebration takes place as a free concert, fireworks, and a couple of races. John and I ran in the 9K loop. It was John's first running race ever, and he did pretty good. I also managed to do well despite the rain at the end.

Some Post race Pictures:

And me rocking out at the free rock concert that very same night:

new deck

John built us a new "deck" on our patio. The deck covers up the ugly concrete patio quite nicely. We even got some flowers. You can see the master builder through the patio door.