My parents invited me to come along for a visit to the Floriade, a horticultural expo that is held once in a decade. Every time it's held, the expo is situated in a different part of the country, and this time it was in Venlo.
The park was split in 5 themes: World Show Stage, Environment, Education & Innovation, Relax & Heal and Green Engine. We didn't feel like rushing through the park, so we decided to just take it easy and see where we would go. Eventually we managed to visit Environment, Education & Innovation and World Show Stage before my mom's batteries ran out and we decided to head home; so we still visited quite a big chunk of the park.
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One thing worth mentioning was the catering, and in particular the "soup". As is traditional with theme parks, the catering was ridiculously expensive. When we entered the restaurant, our hunger disappeared quite fast as soon as we saw the pricetags on the menu's. They had the balls to charge € 7,- for a hamburger which roughly consisted of a bread bun, a thin slab of meat, a slice of tomato and a leaf of lettuce; condiments were to be purchased separately for € 0,50 per packet.
Eventually we decided to go for the organic tomato soup (€ 5.70 per bowl), a choice we ended up regretting quite a bit. Somehow I suspect that they opened a 1 liter can of soup, then added half a liter of coffee creamer, 5 liters of water and 500grams of vegetables to it; and that was to be the soup of the day. It was just a very lean broth with a tomato-ish flavor to it.
All in all a great day, but next time i'm bringing my own food
It was 7:00 in the morning, and my alarm goes off; time to get up for work! As I lay in my bed, still somewhat dazed, I suddenly heard some ticking just outside my window. I peeked through my window shutters and was rather surprised to be staring right in the face of a young Jackdaw!
When I came back from the shower about 20 minutes later, it was still there! I opened the shutters and said to the bird "So, what do you want ?". All I got back was a little "caw"-like sound. The bird jumped onto the handle of my window and sat there watching me.
It was a rather awkward, but awesome way to start my day.
During one of my Sunday hikes, I ran across a caterpillar that was rather large and hairy. A bit of investigation told me that it was a caterpillar for a gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar).
It was about 6cm long.. I'm sure glad that it didn't drop in my neck; brrrr!
As i said in a previous post, there would be another open house day at dairy farms in my area. I decided to go to another farm, which was even closer by than the last one. Most of the big cows were already outside, but fortunately they had a lot of calves which are even cooler.
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A little bit down the road there was a strawberry farm that also opened its doors to visitors for the occasion. I took a quick peek there, and enjoyed some free snacks and drinks.
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Next open house for the dairy farms is on June 13th... on which I will visit yet another farm.
The Dutch dairy producer Campina organized an open house event at some of the farms where they get their milk from. I'm always interested in how stuff works, so I decided to check it out.
It was quite crowded, but it was fun. They had some little stands where you could try some yoghurt drinks, milks and puddings, there were some girls that were handing out free products to the visitors; which is always nice. I also took the opportunity to shoot some stills of the beautiful women that work at the farm
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All in all it was a nice event. I got some nice photos, I've got some free dairy products and it kept me busy. On April 25th, there's another open house session which I will attend as well.
Nature is cruel, but very awesome. While my family was enjoying nature in the form of a nice cup of tea and oatmeal cookies, suddenly a sparrow hawk landed on a fence post in the backyard to enjoy it's lunch: a freshly caught blackbird.
I rushed towards my camera bag and took some snapshots from the bedroom window. Since the sparrow hawk didn't seem to mind that my dad and me were hanging out the bedroom window with big zoom lenses, I decided to sneak into the backyard for some close-up shots.
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I managed to get within about 1 meter of the bird. At first it seemed that the sparrow hawk couldn't be bothered with my presence, and continued to nibble on the blackbird. After a while it had enough of me and flew off with the carcass still in its talons.
After doing my groceries, I decided to take the scenic route home. While driving on a dike (*giggle*), I was suddenly overtaken by an ambulance and two fire trucks. Since I didn't have anything better to do at the moment, I decided to follow them and see what was up. a few hundred meters own the road, there were a lot of police vehicles, another fire truck and a couple of ambulances.
Apparently, one of the tractors that was trimming the grass on the side of the dike, had tipped over and was laying upside-down in the moat next to the dike. About 2 minutes after I had arrived at the scene, a trauma helicopter (sort of a flying ambulance) landed in the backyard of the house next to the dike. A little over 40 minutes later, the driver of the tractor had been extracted from the wreckage and was on his way to the nearest hospital.
The Sympetrum vulgatum, or the Vagrant darter, as it's known to the public. I caught this big boy on a bird feeding platform in my parents' backyard. Fortunately, I had my point-and-shoot camera at hand to capture a nice image of it. I'm surprised how it seemed to ignore me and just sat still.
My second attempt at time-lapse video. The real time of this video was about 1 hour.
Today I was planning to visit an urbex location in the east of the country. The location turned out to be a dud, so I was left with some spare time to kill. Since there were some nasty clouds overhead, I figured I'd give time-lapse video a try. This means you take a photo every x seconds, and in the end you stitch them all together in a movie. Unfortunately about 30 mins into my experiment it started to rain pretty badly, so I had to abort the mission. I did manage to get about 300 photo's, though.