We are very excited to again have a visitor from Regina! When Sandy and Danny (Nargang) were here I already learned that Marlin (who we met in Regina because Tim’s friend Danny Stephenson lives in his house) was planning to come to Holland for a workshop. Plans were being made in the summer and Marlin came to Heerlen right after the workshop and will stay until one day before flying back to Canada.
August 14th – Heerlen
Nico was working late shift, so I asked our neighbour Brian if he could drive me to the train station to pick up Marlin. That was around 6pm or so, at home we had some macaroni and chatted all evening until Nico got home. I had taken the next day off, but decided there and then that I would take the whole week off, I had enough vacation days left 🙂 Partly based on the things we showed Sandy and Danny, we had been planning what to do with Marlin, esp. since he was up to pretty much everything he had seen on Sandy’s pics. We wanted to make the most of the days Marlin would be here, so we discussed our ideas and made a plan.
August 15th – Valkenburg, Maastricht
Valkenburg is a small, but very popular tourist town here in the south, it has some very old sights, like a castle ruin and caves created while digging marl out to build the castle and houses with. We went to the castle ruin and after that we took a tour in the cave below the castle. Since Marlin was the first guest we took there and it was built out of marlstone, we renamed it “Marlin’s castle” 🙂 In the cave Marlin was esp. surprised to find so many paintings (with charcoal) on the walls (the caves have been shelters in the world wars). It was a special trip for me too, because I have lived in this town for a few years, but it was over twenty years ago I visited the ruin (even though the town is just 10-15 km away!). Nico hadn’t even been there before! Afterwards we had a coffee on one of the patios in town. Next we drove on to Maastricht (around 10 km further) and walked around in the historic center of the city and around the city walls for a bit where we even ran into the musketeer D’Artagnan 🙂 We had dinner at a nice Greek restaurant before going home again.
In the next few days we’ll show Marlin a bit of Germany in our beloved Eifel region 🙂