Friday January 23rd Eck en Wiel

Written by Jack van Ommen on January 24th, 2014

Last year on the exact same day the ground was covered with fresh snow here in the small hamlet of Eck en Wiel. Now the temperature is at an un-seasonal high of about 45/ 50° F. I love the peace and tranquility of the country side. My distant cousin Karel and his wife Ankie left before the crack of dawn for a week’s ski holiday in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. Karel’s great-grandfather and my great-grandmother were brother and sister. Karel’s grandfather arranged for my mother to start a nursing apprenticeship in Amsterdam in 1918.  His uncle proposed marriage to my mother and if she would have accepted it I might have been born in Indonesia and have become fatherless at an early age. Karl’s uncle was murdered by the Indonesian independence fighters in 1945. As you all know already if you read the whole story in “The Mastmakers’ Daughters”.

I need deadlines. And I just got one today. Yesterday I was advised that the story about the shipwreck is scheduled for the April issue of “ZEILEN” which will be on the newsstands on March 20. I am planning to try and have an add for the new book in the same issue. This will direct me to focus on the completion instead of wandering off on other distractions. I will need to have a cover for it by then and a title. Right now I am on “Come to Sea” and “Kom naar Zee” because of the familiarity with the web site and a short easy to remember title.  I considered “Around the World at Eighty Years” because of my e-mail motto. But I would urge you to give this some thought and I welcome your ideas. What I am trying to focus in the book is :www.bondgenoot.nl

You can do it with little money and at a ripe age and recent technologies and weather forecasting , communications have put this way of life, discovery within a much broader reach.         I wish to share the discoveries of the beauty of the oceans, diversity of the planet and the magnificence of the Creation. I do not want it to be the typical travel journal.

I need your help and suggestions to share these privileged discoveries with many more.

This evening I am invited for dinner at the neighbors across the street, Ineke and Han and tomorrow I’ll be in Barneveld with the Boonzaaijers of the www.bondgenoot.nl cruising friends I met in 2005 in the South Pacific. Wednesday I pay a visit to Willemijn the last of the surviving group of women of the “AGFA Kommando” of the Dachau concentration camp our mother was with.

 

 

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