Back in the Saddle Again

For the last two days I was sequestered in the Beltway apartment because of a stomach "thingy."

I am feeling so well now that this evening we had a very nice dinner in a quaint restaurant a few steps away from the restaurant where we had our wedding lunch almost 33 years ago. We had planned on having dinner in the "wedding" restaurant, but it has now become a pancake (pannenkoeken) restaurant.

We weren't too thrilled about the idea of pancakes, and then we saw there was another restaurant a few steps away that served "real" food. We sat on the glassed-in porch and enjoyed the warm sunshine, ferry crossings, and a delicious three course meal that should have been only two courses. It is terrible when you don't have the appetite for the dessert!

Earlier in the day we traveled to pick up parts for our Friese Staartklok. If you read my Wetcreek Museum Blog (December 9, 2012) then you know which clock I am writing about. The gentleman running the shop was very interesting. He let us know very quickly that the Internet was ruining his business. His words were, "No one drops by here anymore." And boy did he like to talk!

Don't misunderstand me, this was not a weird little Dutch guy in a dark little shop on a narrow street in a quaint little village. This 50+ gentleman had his very modern and well-lit manufacturing shop in his modern light brick house on a small but very modern road about an hour's drive from the Beltway. My hub found this guy's complete catalogue on the Internet, and we could have ordered everything. But we chose to drive there instead.

We got the pieces we needed plus extensive explanations of how they were made. When he said we could clean and oil the clock ourselves, we added a small bottle of clock oil. Then he took us back into the well-lit workplace so that he could make us a minuscule dipper for the oil. We heard about his 90 year old father who has a clock museum and still goes to auctions and markets to buy more, while his mother has been using the same refrigerator for the last 35 years and needs a new kitchen.

When he said he was the 7th generation in his family of klokkenmakers or "fooling around with clocks," we knew what made him tick.