We rose early for the day trip to Deventer. Our train was scheduled to leave Centraal Station at 9:01 am but we found out that the rapid train didn't run on Sunday's so we took a connection through Utrecht.

Deventer is closed up tighter than a drum on Sunday with the exception of the town square. It's a buzz of activity and the patios are filled with cafe after cafe. With lunch over we've been bogarting our table for as long as we can - T&j went to the Deventer museum for a quick look while we saved the seats.

Both Deb & I are still pretty sick - at least it's a little better during the daylight as we wheezed and coughed all night.

Deventer is really a nice, no so little Dutch town of about 100,000 inhabitants. It has been some thirty years since I explored Deventer to this degree but it's still home. Rumor has it that the Deventer's have a castle somewhere here - we looked hard, but I think that's all that it is - rumor.

We had arranged to meet Berre Zinkweg and his wife, Ingrid at a local restaurant - Cafe Antoinette in the old section of the city at 5:00 pm. What would I say to a guy that I haven't seen in 31 years. I did make a list of things that I'd remembered which I thought would help. We were the first to arrive, in fact the first in the restaurant we're we had the opportunity to meet the quirky owner Hans.

Just shortly after we sat down, Berre and Ingrid walked through the door - complete with a light blue scarf together with light blue jeans. The girls commented after dinner that it was great to see a man with the European flair and that he looked very debonaire. We started to chat and it went well - it was like the past 31 years disappeared and we were just getting caught up. We met his amazing wife Ingrid who has a fitness gym in Oldenzaal - they make a great couple !

With dinner over, photos taken and a some shots of Amaretto we said our goodbyes and headed for the 1 1/2 hour train trip back to Amsterdam. We booked 2nd Class fare for the return trip but we ended in the "stitle" or "silence car. Anyway I know that I speak loudly at the best of times, so we were chatting in our seats when one of the local dutch boys (he looked like he was a member of the Nazi Youth Group) spoke up and said this was a "silent" car and he would appreciate it if we could be quiet. Tom responded to this kid that he had just asked her to lower her levels to which he responded "I hope she will listen". We were all fuming, but decided that any further comments or challenges at this point would be inappropriate. All we did was cough and sneeze and blow the germs in the directions of the seat across the aisle. I hope that his eyes are watering and his chest is full when he wakes up.

We got back to the boat around midnight. We knew that we needed a large cab to accommodate our luggage so we grabbed a cabbie's cell phone. Berre was good enough to make the call to the driver at dinner - his dutch certainly helped book the reservation for the morning - maybe that's why he arrived at the boat 15 minutes early. We got to the airport by 10:00 - so we are 2 1/2 hours early and heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for the final round of our adventure.