The end.

Saturday, October 28th 2017.

Well, here I am editing my last blog post. It's been exactly 10 years since I started. The main reason being that I emigrated from Amsterdam (The Netherlands) to Adelaide (Australia) and I wanted to keep my family and friends up-to-date about how I was doing on the other side of the world.

Writing this post forces me to think of the past 10 years of my life and it's actually pretty confronting because so much happened; emigration, relationships, different employers, being depressed and in need of a shrink (twice), buying and selling my appartment, buying my Mustang and recently a garage.

When I started my blog I was 34 and weighed over 135 kilos. Now I'm 44 and I weigh almost 85 kilos.

Look at me then and now:

It's been 10 crazy years when I think about all the things that happened but also 10 I wouldn't want to have missed. All the new experiences I got, the people I met, the jobs I got and finding out that indeed, the grass is ALWAYS greener on the other side.

So why am I quitting? Quite simply, it's started to feel like an obligation. More and more I have the feeling I want to spent my time differently doing other things. Less digital and online. This feeling ain't new, it started a year ago already but I really wanted to get to 10 years.

So, since this is a photo-blog I won't write too much.

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who contributed to my blog in one way or another and also thanks to all the people who followed me for all or some of those 10 years.

I'll leave you with one more blog from today. As of tomorrow, if you wanna know what's going on with me, you'll simply have to call or text me and schedule a night out with me :-)

Byebye, thanks, auf wiedersehen, mazzel, au revoir and ciao!

With love,
Vincent.

It's garage-weekend again and I started with some painting. Now the lower back walls are done. It will be lighter there when the floor is in. I think I'll do the rest of the walls later.

I hung up the tool board in its definite spot. My future workbench will be in that corner under the stairs.

I also wanted to practice welding today but I didn't get around to it, that's for tomorrow, but there won't be anything about it on this blog because, the blog ends here :-)

Selfie time

I made a selfie in the elevator. My face is a lot thinner than it used to be, I've really lost a lot of body fat over the last few months. This diet does work well but now it's time to quit dieting and get back to normal food I think.

In the evening I went for a very nice walk.

Back at home

I think Silver missed us coz he slept on our bed with us the whole night. It is so nice to have him around again.

Downstairs the vacation's aftermath was there to be cleaned and put away. Silver knows what's inside those little packets very well ;-)

In the afternoon I dropped off the roof case at my garage. My Mustang was still there, nothing happened while I was gone, good.

On the way home I washed my car which made it all sparkling again :-)

While viewing the photos Silver came to sit with me. I love him :-)

Holiday 2017, day 9 : Bordeaux

Today we visited the city of Bordeaux. We parked outside the city centre so we started our journey in the suburbs. To get to the centre we walked through a market / food court.

Even the suburbs look nice here.

Then we saw the Basilique Saint-Michel. Pretty cool building considering the tower is seperate from the rest of the building.

Very nice square around it as well with a little book market.

We stopped here (Moony) for lunch, very nice place, can recommend a meal here!

It's a burger bar and they've got some real nice one too!

It was getting pretty hot outside eventhough the forecast said "cloudy"....
This is the Pont de Pierre crossing the Garonne river.

The banks of the Garonne in Bordeaux. The river itself was big but the water very muddy.

Another Bordeaux landmark: Porte Cailhau.

And then this "must see". It's "Le Miroir d'eau", mirror of water. Very nice place with lots of people enjoying a refreshing stroll in the few centimeters of water.

At first I was wondering why they call it a mirror...

But every so often the water level drops, leaving wet stones behnd and then....

Selfie time!

After a while the water comes back slowly but because the stones have warmed up this creates a lot of steam which in turn is another awesome thing about this "mirror of water" :-)

Walking on.... we came across the coolest icecream shop in Bordeaux. They make the icecream look like a flower! Oh, and you can get a macaron on top!

Of course there had to be some shopping involved too.

Milan and I thought the LEGO store was quite fascinating :-)

And then we walked back to our car.

I can conclude that Bordeaux is very much worth a visit and definitely a city I could live in!

The back of my garage.

I did a few little things in my garage, nothing major. I'm thinking of putting a big car lift in the back so that I have the option of storing (and working on) a second car. That would mean that the floor above can only go as low as 5 wall pieces (375 cm). That would not leave room for a second floor in the back though...

I made a selfie with Silver, he didn't notice ;-)

More repairs...

I tried "Huttenkase", some kind of cottage cheese for the first time, it had nice herbs in it. Very nice! My diet ain't so bad now eh?

When I left the house little boy Silver was seeing me out.

I had to bring my car in for repairs again. It's just a few cosmetic things because some douche reversed into me at the lights. I'll have it back on Friday.

In the evening Simone and I went for a walk again. It was warm but cloudy.

Simone made this photo of me with Silver. Silver is the best :-)

The bike ride

Simone and I went for a bike ride this evening. The weather was really nice.

The ride mainly went through fields, some with cows :-)

The sun had 2 sun dogs or parhelia.

Us :-)

We had a chat with a group of cows.

The half-way point of our trip was a little town called Ilpendam.

Windmill.

The ride was lovely and I think we'll do it again.

Enjoying the moment...

Something that doesn't happen very often anymore now that Silver has fully grown up...

The beach lunch

Today we wanted to do something nice so we drove to Bergen aan Zee for a lunch at the beach.

The weather was great and so was our lunch.

Back home we had to walk the folders. I saw this mother duck with 8 ducklings in their puberty ;-)

The powder-food

So I've started another diet yesterday. I was fixing today's menu...


Because of my cold I wasn't feeling great and I'm also really tired. I sat on the couch a bit and Silver kept me company. He's the best :-)

Meeting another Mustang owner

I met this guy called Jeroen today. I know him from the 7173MUSTANGS.com forum and he messaged me that he was close by and asked if I wanted to meet up, how nice! So I took a few hours off and we took my Mustang for a spin. It was the best run ever: Good start, good idle, nice driving, great stuff! Jeroen was a little impressed with my car complimenting on the looks and also the way it sounds ;-)

I let him look at my car as he was looking for a few references for his convertible. As he was going along he pointed out that my original buck-tag is still there. I hadn't even noticed! I need to clean it up and get a better picture as the stuff on the tag tells me something about the car, maybe even stuff I don't know yet. Cool!

He also brought me a copy of the '73 facts and specs manual. It's an old re-print but that's OK. I thought that was mighty nice of him to do!