Blog - The Naked Kayaker

Wadlopen: Walking from the Netherlands to Schiermonnikoog Island at low tide

6/16/2016

Meet our new band, The Wadlopers

After starting out the weekend with a fantastic cabrewing tour of Lauwersmeer, it was rise-and-shine at 6am on Sunday for a truly Dutch adventure: WADLOPEN. Wad = mudflat, lopen = walking (in Dutch. In Flemish it means running, which would have been ridiculous). While I've done my fair share of mudflat walking as part of my job in California and the Netherlands, I've never attempted it in a recreational way. We put on our rainbow basketball shoes and trudged 16km across bare mudflat to get to Schiermonnikoog, the easternmost Frisian Island in the Netherlands.

A Short Cabrew on Lauwersmeer, on the north coast of the Netherlands

6/16/2016

Pumped paddlers! Alex, Elizabeth, Nena, Henk, and Sander.

Last weekend some Delft friends and I plopped ourselves into a couple canoes for a cabrewing adventure on Lauwersmeer - a lake adjacent to the Wadden Sea, about 45 minutes north of Groningen. It was my first time sleeping in a tent in almost a year (so sad), and my first time in a canoe since long before moving to Europe. Why don't I do this more often? It was fantastic.

I also did some Water Nerd research about Lauwersmeer, and it has quite an interesting/complicated history of floods, poldering, and damming. If you just want to read about that, you can skip to the Water Nerd section.

Trip Planning 101: The Dreaming/Brain Dump Phase

6/13/2016

The second post in a 6-part series about trip planning. For an overview of the complete series, please visit the Trip Planning 101 page.

So where do we start? Well, how do most trips start? If you're anything like me, it often happens when you're hanging out with your friends (maybe even while on a trip), and someone mentions that a friend of theirs went on a trip to [insert awesome place]. Or it happens when you're aimlessly Google-image-searching one national park after another. The first step in trip planning is the dreaming phase. This is where you and your travel buddies dream up what you want to do, dumping all your ideas in one place. Fun, right?

So what does this step look like in the Best Trip Planning Spreadsheet Ever? Read on...

Dreaming about islands and sailboats and rainbows... (Hawaii 2014)

Exploring a newly restored part of the Biesbosch - Jantjesplaat!

6/13/2016

Carlos and Jovan hop out of their boats to take a look at a giant dead fish!

Today we take a short break from the Trip Planning 101 series to visit the Biesbosch, near Dordrecht in the Netherlands. I've visited the Biesbosch in the past, but starting in the southern boundary. Fun fact: Biesbosch translates roughly to "Wetland Forest" or "Reed Forest" (bies + bosch/bos).

Two Sundays ago, HJ and I met up with Carlos (a colleague from work) and his family for their first time kayaking. We did a little loop in what-turns-out-to-be a recently restored wetland - Jantjesplaat. Read on to see photos from our trip, and aerial photos of the wetland before and after completion of the restoration project - so neat!

Trip Planning 101: The Best Trip Planning Spreadsheet Ever, Seriously.

6/6/2016

Celebrating another well-planned trip! (Grand Sable Dunes, MI, 2014)

This is the first in a 6-part series about the awesomeness of spreadsheets for planning your dream trip. An overview of the series can be found on the Trip Planning 101 page. Once a week for the next 5 weeks, I'll describe another part (e.g. budget, packing list, itinerary) of an awesome trip planning tool that I've developed and tested over the course many trips. This is a slight deviation from the standard Naked Kayaker posts, but I'm quite excited to share it because I think it's useful to more than just kayakers.

Goal #1: make trip planning less daunting and a lot more fun.
Goal #2: save money and make the most of your time off.

What exactly is this trip planner?

When it comes down to it - it's a spreadsheet with a bunch of different tabs to organize all your trip-related information.

Boring, right? It doesn't have to be!

What I've come to realize is that not everyone loves spreadsheets. Many people actually dislike them, because they associate them with work or school. If you're one of these people, then I'd like to invite you to change your mind. Okay, let's be realistic for a moment - if you ended up on this blog post by searching google then you're probably also a spreadsheet lover... but let's be optimistic and carry on...