Last weekend I went with my colleague Remco to Idar-Oberstein to see what his hobby of collecting minerals was all about. We spent two days breaking rocks, moving away debris and hammering up some stones. It was hard work, but a fun experience. I’m not convinced to start my own collection though…

Last weekend Adrienne and I went to Harlingen in Friesland. We stayed at the logement Garjen, a nice and cozy guest house in the center of the city. We had never been in Harlingen, but we both really liked the nice old harbor city, with the traditional Dutch crooked houses. We rented bikes and we spent Saturday afternoon biking around following the ANWB network of biking paths. Even tough dark clouds were threatening over our heads it stayed dry the whole afternoon.

I used a combination of HDR and Photoshop to bring out the structure of the clouds in the images even more.

Doris taught us a very nice game, called the Mafia Game. We have been playing the game over and over again and most of the group even continued playing the game again and again during bus ride back to Eindhoven.

I found the rules on the web. Check them out here.

On the last day of the Global I’s Survival Weekend, we split up and one group went for a mountainbike trip and the others went for canoeing down “l’Ourthe”.

Trusting my Lowepro Dryzone to indeed have a “dryzone”, I brought my gear along in the canoe (what use is a good camera if you can’t take it with you).

Once again we had a great time, and we managed not to tip over our boat. This however doesn’t mean we managed to stay dry… The canouing ended in one big water-throwing fest.

Check Picasaweb for more pictures.

On Saturday, after returning from the bivouac location we went to play paintball (a.k.a. painball). It was great fun even though we lost 3 out of the four games. Luckily my camera wasn’t hit by bright orange paint…

If you’re interested in more pictures of the paintballing experience, check my Picasaweb album.

On the evening of the first night we decided that in stead of going for a midnight “dropping” (this has nothing to do with excrement, but it is a drop-off at a desolate spot in the forest, from which you have to find your way back by using nothing but a compass and a bearing), we would go for a bivouac.

Rogier and Anita, the local organizers of the weekend provided each of us (22 people) with a backpack, a water-flask and a mat. We split up in two equally sized groups. Each of these groups got two compasses (and a bearing), a walkie-talkie and some rope and canvas to build a “tent” on the bivouac location.

We started walking around midnight. The walk included, angry cows, too dense forest to traverse and muddy river banks. We (group B) reached our destination around 3.30 am where we set up camp and spent the night.

This is the way we walked, I tracked it with my GPS logger. The time of the way-points are -2 hours, so the arrival time of 1.30 am is actually 3.30 am.

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If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can download the way we walked (and drove) here.