Wow we have had a range of wild weather this week... Gentle winds... No winds... Rain and gale force winds with 8-9 ft waves.....our kids are troopers though and not one of them even batted an eye when we had to leash them to the boat and give them instructions about what to do if they got tossed over board by a wave. We have now been holed up in a Marina for two nights and the kids keep telling us how awesome sailing is. They logged a serious 6 hours in the pla...

Day 2 of sailing in the Adriatic Sea with our friends from Yellowknife, Tim and Debbie and their kids Mira and Shannon. It's great to hang out with them again and surreal to do it on a boat in Croatia. We had an exciting day at sea! Our second day of sailing and we were out in 22 knot winds (40 km/hr). Our 45' boat handled it well as did our Skipper Timmay. Rhian had a smile on her face and I felt like my morning crepes were going to come back up. The kids w...

We have officially discovered Nutella (the Belgian version anyhow) and pastries. Life is changed forever!

It was kind of surreal yesterday - we spent the day with Colin's relatives travelling through WWI and WWII monuments with songs like "Black Benny"and "I will survive " playing on the Belgium radio. Gerta and Gerrit are excellent tour guides... They led us through Verune , Diksmuide (trench of death), Nieuwpoort (where the decision to flood the country to stop the Germans was carried out) , Zonebeke (Passchendale memorial) Tyn Cot cemetery, Vladslo ( German ce...

After 16 hours of travel we have arrived in our destination in Bruges, Belgium. We were even greeted at the train station by my relatives Gerrit, Gerda, Ruben and Bjorn. Ruben's great-grandmother is my great grandfather's sister. They are amazing hosts and even took us to the coast for our first dinner. So far our strategy for dealing with jetlag has been successful - ignore the jetlag, keep going until you drop, sleep 12 hours then bike 75kms. Today went ex...