Ooltgensplaat

'Owlt-ghens-plaht'

Beauties!  And thank you for visiting yesterday's beauties, too!

The idea was to go on the hunt today, owing to the fabulous weather.  A huge traffic jam on the A16, though, discouraged me from proceeding to Dordrecht, as I had planned.  Mobile-phoned AW and asked him what the hell was going on, so he looked it up and it was caused by a traffic accident, with the delay calculated to be 1.5 hours.  So I said, 'Forget it!' and turned towards the A17 as I was just beside that particular access road at that moment.  Thought then of heading towards Rotterdam because there are enough mills there, when, as luck would have it, the Haringvliet bridge was open on the A29.  So, 'forget it again' and I took the access road to Willemstad and then Numansdorp, and then the bridge opened and I made the snap decision to head to Hellegatsplein and choose a windmill somewhere there.  I would have been spoilt for choice.  Very fortunate that I did that, though, as on the way to the N59 from Hellegatsplein, when I turned right on the road from Ooltgensplaat to Oude Tonge, suddenly, there before me, was this sea of tulips.  All hunting plans were put away and I knew this view was going to be today's shot.  In short, traffic jams have their uses.  To give the story a sad little twist, the cutters were busy in the fields.  There's an extra.  They cut off the flowers so that all the remaining energy of the plants will go to the bulbs, resulting in much larger bulbs, which is the whole point.  I hope to be able to return in the weekend.  Between today and the weekend, though, we'll first have a spot of cold, wet weather.

On a brighter note, our curfew is over.  Not that that will make much of a difference for AW and myself.  Some housework, some genealogy research, and an unintended looooong late night call from Mimi as she had a lot to tell me.  While we were chatting, though, to keep myself awake, I MOOCked at the same time.  Must keep sharpening those multi-tasking skills, you never know when they'll come in handy.