The McKenzies' Blog…

The day started stupid early today… Aggravated by the fact it was also the day we changed the clocks. We got up about 445 to get ready to head out for the Sterna Ferry from Harwich to Hook of Holland. The drive to the ferry was nearly uneventful… Lisa had a coughing spell and ended up throwing up in the car, so a stop was in order to clean her and the car. We arrived in good time for boarding the ferry.

Once on-board we made out way to a window seat near the front of ‘Food City’ close to the kids play zone. We had breakfast on board then the kids disappeared to the play area only to return for nibbles and drinks and the occasional potty break. Just after lunch a magician came out to the kids play zone and put on a show for about and hour… He was like the pied piper, kids from far and wide appeared to watch his magic and balloon tricks.

The arrival and disembarkation was uneventful, as was the drive to Amsterdam, well mostly. A couple of wrong turns due to clarity issues of the GPS coupled with the giggling at it speaking road names of infinite length.

We attempted to get to the hotel to unload the car, that failed as there was no where to stop for blocks.. Literally. We decided to just got the Park and Ride at Olympisch Stadion. Here can park for just €6/day (24hrs). That comes with a free tram/bus pass to and from the PnR. We made it to Albert Cuypstraat on the tram and stopped to feed the kids at McD’s. Then it was about a 10 min walk to the hotel.

I failed to notify my over zealous bastard of a bank, who might I add will shut down my credit card at the very thought of a foreign purchase, shut down my card when the hotel attempted payment. A quickish call to them and several insults at them later had my card restored to service.

That pretty much brings me to now as I am typing this blog entry… Lisa is sleeping, Emma is fussing about and Yuki is on my laptop and that leaves me on my phone to blog that pretty much does it for day on in Holland. Stay tuned for the results of day 2, tomorrow.

Posted by Wordmobi

… at Costa Coffee reading her Disney mag and drinking a strawberry milkshake

Lisa says “Thanks very much Karin!”

We are back home now and glad we decided to not to stay an extra night. The threat of possible bad weather (rain) was enough to send us packing today as was originally planned. On the way home we drove through a hell of a rain storm that brought along with it a 10 or 11 degree drop in temperature. It went from 22C to 11C in about 5 mins.

I’ve finally got the photos posted on Flickr now. The easiest way to see them all is by going to the Camping 2009 Collection.  You can see we had a great time

While we were away I was blogging using my Nokia N97 phone with the use of Wordmobi (WordPress Blogging Tool) and QuickOffice 6.  Entering text into Wordmobi is fine but there’s no spell check available in the tool.  So, the process I used was to write up the posting content in QuickOffice and saved as a Word Document.  Once it was complete and spell checked I’d copy the text and paste it into Wordmobi.  This then allowed me to post direct to the blog and add the tags and whatever I wanted.  All in all this process was very good and worked well for me.  I had my laptop with me including my datacard and power source but never once turned it on during the week we were away.  I was able to do everything I needed to using my phone.  Other apps I used were the Facebook App that came installed on the phone and my favorite Twitter App – Gravity.  I would have been online using Nimbuzz, but for some reason I just couldn’t get authenticated, but it worked fine from home, not sure what happened there.

I’ve received a lot of positive comments from people via various paths about my blog postings while away.  Thanks for the comments and thanks for reading them too!

I really must try to blog more often… perhaps with the new found process using my phone I will feel more like it.  Since moving from Windows to Linux full time on my laptop it’s not as convienent to use my one beloved Windows too, Windows Live Writer … truely a great application for blogging on WordPress sites.

Thank again for following our holiday and reading the site.