Time to write...

Yesterday, our Scouts Band hat the great experience to march along with 34.000 walkers during the last day of the Nijmeegse Vierdaagse (4 days walk). We had an audience of thousands of people, but we had some delay because there was pooring rain and thunder in the afternoon. We had a combined Band out of three Bands and with those people, we will visit the World Jamboree in England next week! So this actually was the final rehearsal...







After this experience, I went into town with Michiel and I met Theun, Bertil, Freek and Henk. Later, Martijn and Janneke came as well and they offered me to sleep at their place, so I didn't need to drive home. The party ended at about 3.30 with a long walk to their place... During this week, there were over a million of visitors in town, much music, food etc., which gives a great atmosphere!

The pic was made by my dad who waited for hours in pooring rain and thunder to see our Band...

So today I came back from Nijmegen and I'm basically doing nothing, for which I didn't have much time the last months. I've had a very busy time, because of my job, the chairmanship of the Scouts group and my musical activities. Fortunately, now it's summer holiday, so all the activities stopped until half of August. Which gives me a bit of real free time, time to do some gardening, motorbiking and other nice things.

And of course: work! The job is great: the colleagues are nice and the projects are very practical and interesting. I work four days of nine hours, of which I'm two days in the forest or visiting customers, and two days in my office. The forest work contains marking trees, organising and coordinating harvest and inventories, so it's very diverse. In April, I even went to Orléans, France, to visit a forestry expedition. After one night in a hotel, I camped near the Loire river, which was very nice. On the way back, I visited the forest of Fontainebleau.
Furtheron, it's a very busy job, with loads of projects. But this makes it interesting, every day is different!

At the end of April, it was time to have the Scouts' "summercamp". This was a few months earlier than we are used to, because of the World Jamboree. We had extremely hot weather and a very nice camp with great activities. I was the cook again (and no one got sick...). One night, I even fried chicken in a stewing pan, that was delicious! The previous night, we watched a movie in the middle of the forest!

At the 4th of May, I had to go home from the camp, to join the World War II remembrance in my village, where I played the Last Post signal. This always is a tense moment, but very nice and an honour to do.


At the end of May, Léon, Annina, Anne, Mark, Sanne and I went to the German Vulkaneifel to hike. This is a great area with a volcano-landscape. We had some moments of heavy rain, but furtheron, we had a great hike and good company.
The first weekend of June, Wilms last day before being father came and we celebrated this, with some close friends, in a very special way: his brothers picked him up from Brussels (suprise!) and we went canooing in the wetland-area Biesbosch. This was a very nice weekend, only without much canooing, because after 500m, the first two canoos went under water (mine stayed dry!). So the weekend was more like camping, barbecueing and drinking beer...



This is Wilm, who became father of Zenne a few weeks later!

And this is Captain Jeroen driving the motorboat with luggage, barbecue meat and beer!

A few days later, I had a nice play with my jazz combo: we had to play at a wedding-anniversary and this was a very nice party. I "grow" more into playing jazzy solos every time! I bought a trombone, at which I try to play some jazz as well, and I even had my debute on harmonica by playing a blues!

The next musical highlight was the wedding of Cindy and Victor, a few weeks ago. We formed a band out of a samba drum band, a hard rock band and Thijs and me, two trumpeters from our bigband. Together, we played "Late in the evening" from Paul Simon and that was great! Without any rehearsing, we could play it quite good!

So now it's July, the last half year went by very fast and I think the coming will be the same, because loads of nice things to do are planned. I hope to hear from everyone of you and hope to be able to meet you all again!

Jeroen