The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

We met up with friends Steve and Brendan in Paris and, as usual, walked and walked and walked. This time, we discovered La Coulée Verte Paris, also known as the Promenade Plantée, which is an elevated walkway & park that used to be an elevated train track.

We saw a pizza vending machine, but didn’t try it., but we did try a cool little wine bar. And, we walked past the renovated Notre Dame, which is still under construction but looking good.

We also got to experience the city erupting with excitement Saturday night as Paris beat Milan for the Champions League. People were celebrating and streets started getting closed off, along with the Metro stops we needed to get back to our hotel. The Metro itself was shaking from people celebrating and even the driver was honking with excitement at each station.

Dutch kids grow up playing in the forest, or at least in parks with trees. They often lean sticks against trees to build a hut, or a fort (fortje) or a hut (hutje) building (hutten bouwen). It’s part of a way to help kids connect with nature, and it doesn’t cost anything since kids just use the sticks they can find.

For our 25th anniversary, we had about 15 people get together at a pub in London for a couple of hours and then 10 of us went to the ABBA show. Since silver is the color for the 25th and the music is mostly disco, like our wedding, we dressed to match the occasion.

Last night we took a cruise around the canals of Haarlem, which was a new experience for us. There aren’t as many as Amsterdam, but it was nice to see the city from a different point of view and learn a few things from our boat captain/tour guide.

It starts and ends at the windmill in Haarlem.

The first round of flowers are out.

In October of 1996, I painted this ceramic bowl for Sam to use as his water bowl. Since then, I think Ripley, Milo, Busby, and Piper have all used it too. I recall eating pasta out of it while living on houseboat #5, since I didn’t have a dog then.

It has had a hairline fracture for years, but still held water. Last night there may have been too much water in the bowl that froze, because this morning these two pieces of the side broke off. The bowl is still holding water though, so I’ll glue the pieces back on and see how many more years it lasts.

A few sights walking around Amsterdam. Notice the canal has paper cranes that someone has hung over the canal.

I was mostly in the office so didn’t have much time for photos, but here are a few street scenes of Madrid in January 2025.

We have explored markets, navigeted the labyrinth that is each major train/metro station, enjoyed a variety of foods (much of it from convenient stores and sushi belts) and even enjoyed seeing trees with their Autumn colors.

Nara is known for deer that are very used to people; so much so that they approach so you can give them a treat. To get there, we took a sightseeing train from Kyoto and then sat at the front of a train when leaving Nara for Osaka.

We visited an antique toy museum and learned how about 16 different toys worked. Two included figuring out how to remove a string from a piece of wood, which Lorie and a Japanese guy worked on together, with no shared language.