Wednesday 28 February 2018

A 'special' adventure with Sue - no. 204 at Loonbeek



As you have seen in the title, there is something special about this adventure. Today, we have brought with us Sue, my mother. She hadn’t been outside for a while and it was a nice day so we decided to go for an adventure together.


We started off on a path that quickly went off the beaten path. Ice littered all of the nooks and crannies everywhere. Many times I couldn’t resist picking up a pebble and throwing it at the ice.



The view varied a number of times from dry soil everywhere around to a farmhouse. The good thing for Sue was that she chose the perfect time to join us. This was one of the nicer adventures. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the warmest. The wind seemed to always be against us and it only seemed to get colder as we continued. Luckily, Tonio prepared some hand warmers for us. These hand warmers go on for about 8 hours so even a few hours after the adventure I was using it to warm our hands.

And finally, we went back to the car and drove home...

Did you enjoy our adventure? If you have then make sure to join us on our next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland. Also, check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. But for now,
goodbye!

GianlucaDeGringu




[by Tonio]:

We had a special guest with us today: Sue. For her, we reserved one of the most beautiful walks since a long time. It was sunny - our third successive adventure with sun shining into our faces during the second half of the walk. Not bad for winter in Belgium.



But it was also freezing, and this created an interesting effect on the ground. In the previous two weeks, the sky stole the show with an interesting interplay between sunlight and constantly changing cloud formations. Today, with no clouds at all and a brilliant blue sky, our attention turned to the ground.

We saw icy puddles, many of which Gianluca tested for solidity by hurling stones at them...


... martian landscapes:




... and strange icy shapes. Curiously, in some cases where puddles had frozen over the surface formed like a glass sheet with a void underneath. Pity that, a few seconds after this picture was taken the heart shaped loop was no more, having been shattered by you-know-who. With the forecast temperatures, it had every chance of remaining intact for a whole week. Oh, well.

Interesting and photogenic as our outing was today, we were glad to go back inside the heated interior of the car and back home for a warm coffee.

Tuesday 20 February 2018

Back to the Moses stick: it's the quality that counts!

Today, the unusual thing about this adventure was that there really isn’t much to talk about. This adventure will probably be posted just after number 200: we didn't have time to post because we were on holiday in Bulgaria.


We started walking at about 3:00 in the afternoon. We are now walking in afternoons instead of mornings. The reason for that is we wanted to change things up a bit. In its ways the sun is much nicer because of the orange afternoon glow as it shines on the fields. Personally I prefer it.



Towards the middle of the adventure I went back to my old ways. I found a perfect stick and used it for support. I call it the Moses stick because in many stories with image he had a stick while leading the Israelites out of Egypt. A few minutes later we passed a corner and there were about five dogs that passed us. Tonio isn’t the biggest fan of dogs so he wasn’t too happy. Those were the animals of the day.

Even though I don’t have much to write, the view wasn’t any less beautiful. It reminded me of the day of the amazing drive in Iceland with the sun a similar colour as it gleamed on the mountains to our left.

Finally, we went back to our car and drove home. Did you have fun? If you did then make sure to join us on our next adventure. Also, be sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. Hope to see you in the next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu



[By Tonio]:

Today's walk was very much a continuation of last week's, without the spectacular clouds. Or any farm animals. I did manage, however, to take a few interesting pictures. Nothing much happened. In fact, we considered this to be one of the least eventful of our adventures. We just walked, chatted and enjoyed the scenery.







We discussed whether it's possible to have a situation where quantity would be more important than quality. You could say that today's pictures are an illustration of the rule, i.e. that it's the quality that counts.


Sunday 18 February 2018

A 'flatty' adventure

Today, was a mix of many adventures that we’ve had before, some so old that they aren’t even in the blog!

The points stop abruptly at 125 and the next point is at 200, so the adventure started there.


If we hadn’t worn our walking shoes this adventure would be a struggle. About half of the adventure was us navigating the marsh-like path even though our surroundings looked nothing like a marsh.

A shadow selfie: in Maltese you could say it's a dellfi...


At the beginning of the adventure, there was a steep uphill. While we were going up Tonio predicted that this adventure would be "very hilly". He couldn’t have been more wrong. For the rest of the adventure the ground was as flat as a pancake.

A lot like adventure 516 (the first adventure in the mix) the clouds contrasted the flat terrain which made nice pictures. The clouds were so nice that they deserved a few pictures by themselves.




A field of soil looked like rich dark chocolate. It looked so good that I was tempted to reach out my hand, get some soil and taste it, even though I knew that it was just going to taste like soil. It reminded me of a very old adventure we had where we saw a field that had also looked like chocolate. But the chocolate in that adventure was much neater and looked more like chocolate powder as the grains were much smaller and lighter.


As we turned to the right there was a change of scenery. We passed through what looked like a tunnel of trees (ahem adventure 516 ahem) and the fields turned into the simplest green grass. This reminded me of a saying ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. Although we didn't mention it in our blog posts, in almost every adventure we complain that if we went the other direction it would have been nicer. I said to Tonio that if we both went in opposite directions we would both say that the other direction was nicer. This brought me to another thought. One reason we humans are still sane and not extinct is because we always want better than what we have. So greed in a way is actually a gift because without greed I don’t think we would still be alive. We wouldn’t have evolved as humans and we would have stayed in our barbaric ways.


We proved the fact that the grass was always greener on the other side literally. We saw three donkeys eating grass (we also saw donkeys a few adventures ago). They ignored us at first but after about 30 seconds a donkey started walking towards us. We took some grass and fed it to the donkey even though he had a whole field of grass to eat from. We fed him some more grass and another donkey came towards us. We fed it some grass and suddenly he brayed for ten seconds straight. It must have meant 'thank goodness' in donkey language. I thought he was thinking ‘thank goodness I finally managed to eat some grass from the other side that is clearly greener’ but it was in fact ‘thank goodness she has come’. The 'she' was the owner of the donkeys with dinner. No wonder they were eating so much grass. They had come to us thinking that the grass was greener and tastier on the
other side even though they had a whole field of grass surrounding them. The saying is correct. The grass is always greener on the other side.


And finally, we went to the car and drove home. Did you enjoy our adventure? If you did then make sure you join us on our next adventure. Also, if you haven’t already, make sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. But for now, that’s all folks! See you on our next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu





[by Tonio]:

Into the 200s and back to the origin of this blog, close to Huldenberg and the place where we had the idea to start chronicling our adventures in Dijleland. I started off the day with my famous last words: "I think today's adventure will be hilly". Indeed, the first path was rather steep, but it turned out by the middle of our walk that today's adventure was actually... flatty.



It was also a bit of an interesting mix of our "post-sciatica operation" walks, minus the forest. For example, the sky rewarded us with an interesting and sometimes spectacular mix of cloud formations and play of light...







... and we finished off our adventure yet again with a close encounter with farm animals. After talking to cows, horses and rams on previous occasions, today it was the turn of two donkeys. Again, it took quite some persuasion to establish trust, but when the ice was broken, we had them literally eating out of our hands.