Van a Gone!

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Trip Start Dec 26, 2011 Previous
Entry Trip End Apr 17, 2012

  Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Monday, April 16, 2012

After 16 months of living in the snug little interior of our wonderful yellow '87 Westfalia camper (not counting an 8 month hiatus back home), and through at least 26 countries, with almost 50,000 kilometres of driving, we have turned over the keys to Albert of "thecoolvw.com" Check out his website. Albert runs this little business of buying and restoring and reselling old VWs, mostly vans and campers of various sorts. The older models... 1950s through 1970s are real collectors items around Europe, and increasingly so in North America. Our '87 camper is a little bit on the new side for the true fanatics, but Albert is moving towards these newer "T25" models as they will become increasingly in demand. He is a lovely fellow to do business with, and has a successful business operating from 3 or 4 barns near his home and his family's farm in Kloosterzande. He showed us some of his current stock, which was very interesting to see, especially the very rare models such as a 1955 van, an old church van with the marking still visible, and an amazing old East German "knock-off" model, of which only 4 still are known to exist in the world.
We have been staying at Zeeburg Camping near Amsterdam while cleaning up and packing, and did manage to get one nice afternoon in Amsterdam.
The "last trip" today was a 2 hour drive out to the Zeeland area of Netherlands where Albert has his home and shop. Most of the drive was boring motorway, but the last few kilometres were delightful, through very flat farmlands with pretty little houses and villages, and we got our first glimpse of tuilp fields.
Once the car business was done, and Albert showed us around, he drove us about an hour to the train station at Roosendal where we caught a train back to Schiphol airport and our hotel for the last night.
So... thank you to all of our faithful readers for the past two years. I have been encouraged to do some more writing by some of you, and have begun to mull over some ideas, particularly my fascination with some of the socio-religious aspects of our travels. Pat has been collecting photos of sculpture, paintings, architecture and interesting doorways (!), so who knows what will come next.
Signing off.... for now...

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