Category: 2026

We did not leave the campground today. We are both jet lagged from yesterday but it is hitting us differently. Ton woke up in the middle of the night and tossed and turned. She finally fell asleep near dawn and slept in until about 10. I slept thru the night, but crashed about 1 pm until 4:30 pm.

We took a walk in the evening and did a census of the vans in the campground. About 250 vans in a campground that holds 450, but it is only March. The population is about 85% German, and there are more kids than normal so we are guessing German schools are on Easter holiday.

The top picture is of the automatic pizza machine that was doing a booming business as we went by. Also, since we were here last they have automated the camp store so there are no humans. You punch a code to get into the store, and pick what you want and checkout at a automatic cashier. I guess this is progress. They have also added an automatic check in machine, though they do open their reception for limited hours of the day for the old timers who prefer to interact with humans.

We traveled to Amsterdam to start our spring trip. The trip today was the smoothest ever. This time we routed ourselves Portland to New York to Amsterdam. The flight from Portland was early and we arrived earlier than usual due to all of the TSA troubles from the government shutdown. There was no line at all so we were thru in record time. Both of the flights arrived very early so our tight connection in New York become a comfortable connection. Our flight to Amsterdam arrived 45 minutes early and we were one of the first international flights of the day so there was no line at immigration and we were thru in under 10 minutes. If all travel days could be so smooth…

We had contacted our storage place to see what time we could arrive. They told us to come as early as we like. They said they would leave the keys in a place that is easy to find but pretty secure. Our Uber driver was a nice guy from Morocco.

The upshot was we arrived at François at 6:15 am. The only glitch was the earliest we could check into the campground was noon. We spent the next three hours unpacking our bags and the plastic boxes we store our left over food in to deter mouse invasions. When I say we the distribution of work is about 90% Ton and 10% Ron.

About 9:15 Ton declared close enough. We decided to take a nap until 10:30 and then head over to Lidl for our first shopping of this trip. We arrived at the campground at high noon and joined a line of 5 German vans. But the check in went quickly and we were parked up 15 minutes after arrival.

Today was as easy as it gets when transiting two countries.