Koniginnedag

"Koninginnedag" litterally means 'queensday', it is the day the Dutch people celebrate the birthday of the queen. That was yesterday, 30 April. Here in Monnickendam it was celebrated in the morning with a 'kids market', where small children (generally under 12 or so), sell their wares, very often consisting of unwanted toys. Quite clever we thought, now the new owners can play with the stuff for a year and next koninginnedag it gets sold on again. The prices are low, often below a Euro up to maybe 2 or 3 Euros. There also was a band of four kids playing trumpet, trombone an 2 saxophones, it did not sound to bad either!
In the afternoon there were some interesting kids games and for the adults races in rowing boats which were paddeled by up to 7 people, using spades as oars. As it was blowing quite hard, there were some hairy moments. We think there was a band or disco in the evening, as a stage had ben set up, but we did not venture out to see that (and it was not so loud that we heard it either).
In between all of that, we did some maintenance, we had already cleaned the boat thoroughly on Friday.
Now, Sunday morning it is still blowing quite hard, probably 6 Bft (25 knots). There are families with sailing yachts on either side of us who want to leave as it is the May school holiday for a week, but as both of them have small kids (between 3 and 6), there seems to be some reluctance (although at least on the one side they have decided to go).
We leave for London on a 19h10 flight, so we'll leave the boat around 4 and travel by bus and train to Schiphol, which is less than an hour away.
Next update from London, I will then also try to post some pictures of the last 3 weeks. We then return to Onbekommerd on 21 May.