Walk­ing from the tram to the of­fice on fri­day I no­ticed a ship in the Veer­haven I hadn't seen there be­fore. Three masts in­stead of the more com­mon two. Later a BMW get­ting a bit to close to a noisy Jaguar drew my at­ten­tion and I took a pic­ture of the scene, in­clud­ing the ship. Back home I'm flip­ping through the lat­est El­se­vi­er trav­el is­sue and on page 28 I'm think­ing "Apart from the ice­berg in the back­ground, that ship looks just like...". So the Ooster­schelde is back from whereev­er it was and right in front of my work­place.

Since FFries­land 2002 I know I don't hate sail­ing. Sail05 wasn't bad ei­ther, and BSC has al­ways been ue­ber­cool. Com­bined with my "We don't need no stinkin' air­lines' at­ti­tude, spend­ing some free time on a ship re­al­ly go­ing some­where seemed to be more and more like a good idea. All the way to New York would be a bit far, but read­ing the Ooster­schelde site tells me Rot­ter­dam - Kiel is an op­tion. How cool would it be to step out of the of­fice, cross the street and em­bark on a sail­ing trip to Kiel? OK, Rot­ter­dam - Longyear­byen is cool­er, but that takes more than a month... Kiel isn't Ham­burg, but go­ing to Kiel adds nice things like ex­pe­ri­enc­ing Die Eisen­bahn­hochbrücke über dem Nord-Ost­see-Kanal. Nice plan for June.