Next up: Ghent to Stadskanaal. It's going to be a long trip.
About 55kms from Stadskanaal is the little town of Coevorden in which we stopped for a quick look...
... and an hour or so later we were parked on the drive of our friends' house in Stadskanaal. No problems apart from the fact that the windscreen wipers stopped once: stopping
in a service station and switching them and the engine off and on again fixed that. Don't ask me why...
The next day we went in Bertha with our friends to Assen as there was an exhibition of quite a few works by the Peredvizniki - our friends are at least as much into art as we are, if not more!
This exhibition was absolutely stunning - I doubt that we shall ever see Ilya Repin's The Volga Boatmen in the oil and canvas again. There were many other striking works of art but this is one of
the ones that made the deepest impression on me. Assen is a lovely town, too, and I wish that I had taken some photographs.
Soon it is time to say goodbye to our friends and head to Leeuwarden but not before another visit to an art gallery! In a small museum in Eelde (the Museum de Buitenplaats, built in the shape of a star fort)
there is another fantastic exhibition - this time of some of Albert Joseph Moore's works. Another artist we love, one of his best known paintings usually hangs in the Russell-Coates Museum in Bournemouth -
so it was slightly odd to walk into a small museum in the north-east of the Netherlands and see it there!
Our friends were with us, of course, as they wanted to see the exhibition too but they had come in their own car as Eelde is well on the way to Leeuwarden. As a 'thank you' for their excellent hospitality
- she is a great cook and they both like a glass of decent wine! - we bought them lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Paterswoldsemeer. As we ate, the heavens opened and poor Bertha got a drenching!
It is a lovely spot.
Saying goodbye to our friends, we made our way on to Leeuwarden and our hotel.
Leeuwarden and a long journey...