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"Believe me, my young friend. There is nothing, absolutely nothing,
half so worth doing as simply messing around in boats." 

The Wind in the Willows

The first kayakers of 2019 land on the Marker Wadden islands

4/10/2019

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View of the wetlands from the viewing tower in the dunes.
On April 7th, 2019, the first kayakers of 2019 set foot on the Marker Wadden islands. The islands are nestled in the northeast corner of Markermeer, a large manmade lake east of Amsterdam. 

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Nice to meet you, North Sea

3/28/2018

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Picture
Why are they walking? Read on to find out :)
Last weekend a fun group of Never Dry paddlers headed out to Stellendam for a late winter (early spring?) paddle on the North Sea. If you are wondering why we are walking in the photo, read on to find out!

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Twee rondjes Kralingse Plas; Two laps around Kralingse Lake + History!

4/27/2017

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Storm clouds hovering above the swans on Kralingse plas.
Picture
... view from the other side of the lake, towards Rotterdam and clearer skies.
The Kralingse Plas is a ~100 ha (~250 acre) lake northeast of Rotterdam centrum. One trip around the square-ish lake is approximately 4 km (2.5 miles), depending how close you stick to the shoreline. The lake is also, conveniently, a 10 minute bike ride from my new apartment, and home to Never Dry, my new kayaking club. Read on to learn about the fascinating history of this seemingly simple lake.

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

6/16/2016

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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.

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

6/16/2016

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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. 

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Paddling through Giethoorn, Venice of the Netherlands

5/20/2016

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Centrum of Giethoorn, Netherlands
Giethoorn is an adorable and quaint town way up north in the Netherlands - almost in Friesland. As you can see in the photo above, it's a dense network of channels, footbridges (180!), and thatch-roofed houses that can often only be reached by boat or on foot. The locals (about 3000 of them) travel over their personal bridges and on punters (boats you push along with a stick, like in Venice). I'd visited this town a few times before (it's a 15 minute bike ride from HJ's parents' house) but never floated along its canals. Until now!

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Return of the Water Nerd: UK Sussex Coast and Thames Barrier

5/12/2016

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View of the Seven Sisters from Seaford Head, UK.
It's been a while since the Water Nerd (and the Naked Kayaker, for that matter) has made an appearance on this blog. But have no fear - a quick analysis of the blog data shows that there's always a huge spike in posting frequency starting in May, continuing through August. Let's hope that's the case again this year - we have some new kayaking destinations coming up soon! 

This weekend the Water Nerd and her partner-in-crime, HJ, took a long-weekend trip to the UK (thanks Belgian Catholic holidays!). They visited the Thames Barrier in London (huge moveable flood barrier) and hiked the gorgeous Seven Sisters cliffs of Sussex...

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Cliffs, caves, beaches, and sunburns in Les Calanques, Southern France

11/23/2015

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Emily paddling past a typical Calanques limestone cliff.
​Les Calanques is a 20-km stretch of coast between Marseille and Cassis on the Mediterranean coast of France. The coastline features steep white limestone cliffs interspersed by narrow inlets backed by secluded cobble beaches (only accessible by boat). In July, Emily, Alice, and I went for an afternoon kayaking trip to check out the calanques of Port Miou, Port-Pin, En-Vau, and L'Oule. Click to read more! 

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Jumping Right In: Hiking Trolltunga on Day 2 in Norway

6/10/2015

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Sitting on the edge of Trolltunga!
Norway might be the most beautiful place I've ever been. It's not that there aren't equally beautiful places in the US (or other places I've visited), it's the fact that everywhere you go there are incredibly dramatic landscapes: fjords flanked by vertical rock walls, mountain tops covered in 3 meters of snow just a 15 minute drive from the fjords, glaciers, dense woods, and more that are constantly changing. Take this with a grain of salt: we've only been here for 4 days and driven about 15 hours from Bergen. But I'm excited for the adventures coming up, and also excited to tell you about the ones we've already survived (yes...).

Click Read More to see photos and read about the Trolltunga hike!

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Le Catch Bizarre: 4 American girls kayak Les Îles Chausey in Normandy

5/20/2015

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It's always been one of my dreams to ride along on a fishing boat and see fish being caught first hand. I just never expected this dream to manifest itself during one of my sea kayaking trips. This weekend it was accidentally realized when we found ourselves on a big fishing boat (sea kayaks on top), plowing through the waves of the English Channel towards Les Iles Chausey - a beautiful archipelago (52 islands at high tide, 365 at low tide) about an hour boat ride from Granville in Normandy. 

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<<Previous

    Welcome!

    This is a blog about exploring the outdoors (mostly by kayak), traveling, trip planning, and coastal engineering. It currently focuses on kayaking in the Netherlands and Belgium, but previous posts cover Upstate New York, California, and much more. See the Complete List of Blog Posts for a history of the site. Looking for something specific? Search the site here.

    In addition to the blog, check out the Water Nerd section, where I write about coastal engineering and hydrology. 

    ​Happy Paddling!
    ​Nena

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