Spacegrazer

We just did our first overnight sail of the season. We left Siracusa, Sicily, last Thursday and arrived at Otranto on the Italian mainland on Saturday morning. So we were underway for 2 days and nights non-stop. Time passes by very strangely underway. There are moments of relaxed bliss when time flies by. There are […]

So we left MdR on Sunday 6 May after spending our second winter there. Shaking off six plus months in a marina is a surreal experience. Suddenly after ages of being in one place the boat is moving. The boat the was once the shape of a house, is once again a house in the […]

Monkeys on My Back The sun was finally shining today so we headed out to the woods and dunes near The Hague and Wassenaar. There’s a lovely bit of forest there designated for kids to build huts, swing on ropes and climb trees, called the Monkey Forest. Beau is getting a bit tired and slightly […]

Today we got together with many of the old gang – there’s seven of us on the picture above from 2004! With (new) partners, friends, and children added over the years, we were with a group of 18 today. Party On, Dudes! We had lots of fun, starting the day with pancakes and prosecco, then […]

Taking a Break from Boat Life – Week 1 The trip from Sicily to The Netherlands did not start very promising, with poor Beau feeling sick. He threw up a couple of times at the airport, and we were worried he would not be able to get on the flight. Luckily, he managed to board […]

Swapping Liquid for Frozen Water Being on land for a month, we are enjoying some activities we normally cannot do on the boat, like ice-skating! Yesterday was the first time the kids ever wore skates. In fact it was the first time they were even on ice! We went to an indoor ice-skating rink, since […]

Monkeying Around From the moment we told the kids that we would go to The Netherlands, they have been excited about going to Monkey Town. It is an indoor play area that we visited last year, and they just love it. We love it too, since it gives us a chance to sit back with […]

More Old Stones This winter we plan to explore Sicily in a series of little road trips. The first road trip led us to the Valley of the Temples near Agrigento. More ancient Greek temples for us, yay! Or, as Kai would put it: more old stones that we are not allowed to climb on… […]

Trick or Treat! Halloween is one of our kids’ favourite holidays. They had been counting down for at least 60 days… We had great fun going around the marina trick-or-treating. 14 kids were in the marina at the time. They all went along the boats together, with us parents in tow off course. The kids’ […]

Back in the Land of Power Ballads We are back in Sicily for the winter. Just one tiny example of things we love about Italy is: listening to Italian radio stations while driving. The excited talking! The power ballads! Love it, just love it. Other than that, we are loving the food, the prosecco, and […]

Check out this awesome video of our boat Spacegrazer in the old harbour of Methoni. Thanks to Jack on SV Vesna for making this video and sharing it with us!

Saying goodbye in Zakynthos Our last Greek island this summer was Zakynthos. Since we had considered ourselves intrepid travellers rather than tourists, we had refrained from buying tacky souvenirs all summer. So… here was our last chance to go shopping! The boys got lousy t-shirts, Zoë a frilly dress, and I got a captain’s hat… […]

Katakolon – a geriatric playground We parked Spacegrazer along the town quay at Katalon to go visit the site of ancient Olympia from there. Katalon is a weird place! The town was completely empty when we got there. But soon after, two cruise ships arrived. Shops opened, souvenir stands popped up, horse-drawn carts and beer […]

Walking in the rain Methoni has a magnificent old harbour, flanked by a fortress and a Venetian tower. Even though it rained and the fortress was closed on the day we were there – we did try to get in, but hey, it’s a fortress – we had fun exploring outside. We also caught up […]

Saying Hiya! to Hades Ancient Greek legend has it that the caves at Diros were the entrance to Hades – the underworld, the realm of the dead… We dropped our anchor in the bay just outside this entrance, and made our way to the visitors’ centre to buy ourselves some tickets. Because you don’t just […]

Early morning arrival After an overnight sail from the island of Milos, which covered about 80 sea miles, we arrived at Monemvasia on the Greek mainland early in the morning. The sun was just rising. The tiny peninsula of Monemvasia looks like a massive lump of rock from a distance. As you get closer, you […]

Santorini is such a stunning, strange place, that I do not even know how to start to describe it. Wikipedia has this to say: Santorini is essentially what remains after an enormous volcanic eruption that destroyed the earliest settlements on a formerly single island, and created the current geological caldera. […] It is the most […]

Let them eat cake We had a birthday coming up on Spacegrazer and the kids were very excited about it. Granddad would turn 68 while staying with us. We had already shopped for cake ingredients a while back, so we could be sure that wherever we would be, we would be able to celebrate properly. […]

Friends reunion We arrived in Kos a couple of days before Max’s mum and dad were set to fly in from New Zealand. We would use that time to tidy up and clean the boat, sort out cabins, stock up on supplies, etcetera. But first, we wanted to catch up with Jack & Julia and […]

  Making friends On our way south to Kos to meet up with Max’s mum and dad, we stayed in Patmos a few days. A couple hours after anchoring up, a boat with a Dutch flag came sailing into the bay, with kids on board! So we waved ecstatically and invited them on board. Wouter, […]