a post about lighthouses, strong winds and horses pulling a rescue boat

We had a lovely time going on holidays. It was us and the boys and my parents, we went to the Dutch island called Ameland for a week. It's just to the north of the country and you have to take a ferry to get there. We had an amazing time! The weather was not always great, and the wind often cold, but still we enjoyed the trip so much!

On the first day at the island we visited the lighthouse. It was built in 1880. You could climb it (236 steps) and we all did, except my mom who doesn’t like heights. The wind up there was tremendous. Stoney nearly gave me a heart attack when he stuck his head and chest through the railing to look where Oma was down there.

climbing the lighthouse...

very windy up here!!

This picture is taken from the top of the lighthouse, viewing the North Sea. If you look carefully you can see the wizard prison Azkaban in the distance.

view in the other direction

After we climbed the lighthouse we went for a walk in the lighthouse area, where there were several kids’ playgrounds along the trail, resembling a whale, fisher’s boats and a rescue boat. Of course Stoney could be found at the highest point: the crow’s nest.

In the evening we went to a demonstration of the ‘horse rescue boat’. Back in the days when there were no moterized vehicles – and for a long time after that actually – they used to launch the rescue boat into the sea with horses. They did a demonstration of this at the beach.

The horses first pull the boat where it is going to be launched and then they get roped to the sides.

While we waited for the demonstration to start it took the boys’ all of one minute to be soaked to their waist. We had put them in boots and jeans because it really wasn’t that warm, mid sixties and there was a cold wind.

In between, we also we ran into Jack Sparrow.

And then there was a chaotic hour when the launch of the boat kept getting postponed, because they didn’t dare do it at the spot they had originally picked. A number of years ago there was a big accident when horses could not get back to the shore and all drowned, because they got into the sea too deep and the current was too strong. Since then, they are always very careful. The Dutch coast is really treacherous, because it has many sandbanks with deep trenches in between. Anyway, in the end they decided to move the boat launch about 300 meters to the south-west, but in all this chaos, we all lost track of each other. Monty and me stuck together, but everyone else got separated. Leland stayed stationary at the spot where he was, hoping that someone would spot him sticking out above everyone. Eventually he found my mom – or she found him – and then they ran into my dad. Meanwhile Stoney had been lost for over half an hour but he didn’t seem to mind. In the end he just popped up and acted as if nothing happened. He wasn’t one bit concerned about being lost. “What do you mean lost? I was just playing.”

In the end we all found each other back again and stripped the boys of their soaked pants before we got in the car. The combined four boots of them were good for about a gallon of water.

I am going to post more pictures, but I will do it in a separate post, because otherwise our computer will crash trying to upload such a large blog at one time.