Provisioning

And then, after a period of hard work (both on the boat and at the place where we earn our money), a period of vacation starts. Three weeks with our family on Linde is in prospect, what a joy!

Roelof has made the necessary preparations on Linde, as you have been able to read in “The keys thrown away“. With 2 full cars (in which we take our dinghy and our adolescents put their clothes) we leave for Lemmer on Saturday morning. We take it easy we agreed, we need to take the time to ground ourselves, to embrace the vacation feeling.

The cars are emptied and the closets in Linde are filled. I haven’t done any shopping yet, we’ll do that tomorrow in Lemmer. Yes, we are close to our home port with a Lidl, Aldi and Jumbo. There is also a Trekpleister and an Action, what more could you want.

And since there is no food on board, we start the vacation with a delicious dinner in the center of Lemmer.

Sunday starts the challenging part. Those who already followed us @bootcasper know that #boatinfood is an important part of our vacation. And without shopping no #bootfood. The challenge in recent years has also been (partly created by the lockdown) to go to the supermarket as little as possible and to be able to eat as much delicious food as possible.

Now, we have a smaller fridge in Linde than we had in Casper (and no freezer), so we’ve given up on this challenge a little bit. Still, we want to anchor a lot and not plan too much, we don’t know when and how often we will have the opportunity to go shopping. So here the shopping will be adjusted accordingly.

The oldest daughter comes along, we start at the Lidl. No shopping list of course, because until Saturday morning I was not really on vacation, but more busy with work. We just walk down the aisles and take everything that seems handy/useful, does not need refrigeration and has a long(er) shelf life.

In a later blog I will pay more attention to the basic ingredients that we have on board to achieve a nice meal almost every day.

For now, I’ll limit myself to: in the end, it was a lot of shopping. Or as we call it boat-shelves. At the Lidl 3 full bags and a box with 12 cartons of milk, then we supplemented this with another 2 full bags at the Jumbo. And of course (that’s what happens when you don’t use a list) we still forgot a few things. Fortunately, we did not accept the challenge of : no shopping this year, so we can buy the forgotten things later. For now, we’ll get through the first few days.

It’s also nice that the marina has those little carts, so we can bring the bags to the boat. Sorry, I didn’t dare to take a picture of this (out of shame for the amount). One by one we lift the bags on board. The youngest one is pumping up our rubber boat with Roelof and later practicing with the winch. Anyway, fortunately they are not in the way inside. I am frightened, where am I going to leave all these shopping bags…. Fortunately I have help and our eldest daughter remains calm. From bag to bag we calmly unpack it all and try to put some sort of system in place, so that we can find things again. I am so glad that Hans and Carla have made a “grab bag” in the compartment behind the couch. It turns out to be really handy and it holds a surprising amount of things!

Finally, everything is cleaned up and as it turns out, there is even room left over. That’s handy for the “forgotten stuff”. How happy I am with the space in our Compromise 39 :). Now the vacation can really begin!