By invitation from Devika: a walk, drinks and dinner in Nijmegen

This was my first meet-up since January and I was quite looking forward to it. It would be good to see old friends and meet new ones, and to see some of a city I had not visited properly before.

I took the train from Meppel at 10.55am. The journey took a while with having to change trains in Zwolle and stopping in quite a few towns along the way. I had remembered to bring a book and talked to a friend on the phone for a while so the journey eventually seemed a lot shorter. I got to Nijmegen at 12.45am, where it turned out I was the first one there, or so I thought...

After a while I saw Jacqueline and Marianne, whom I had met before. Then a guy came walking towards us and asked if we were TB's. That turned out to be Mark (magera), whom I had actually seen at the station before but as I didn't know him I didn't realise it was him! We stood around and talked for a while, while more and more people arrived.

It was great to see everyone again and conversation flowed easily. Eventually we wandered into town, with Eef in search of a sleepingmat (she had left the one she owned previously in Africa) and everyone else in search of a place to sit down for a drink. The group was quite big, more that twenty of us and we didn't loose anyone (or at least not for longer than a minute or two) so we did quite well! When we got to the Grote Markt we found it was market day and some went in search for something to eat as they hadn't had breakfast yet. We found a place to sit down for drinks and spent an enjoyable couple of hours talking and drinking.

We then moved on in the direction of the restaurant and the river Waal, where we found another place to sit and have a couple of drinks. From there it was a walk across the road to Humphrey's, the chosen restaurant for the evening.

Here we all had a 3-course meal for the set price of €22,50. There was lots of choice for starters, mains and desserts. The food was fine although in my opinion it needed a lot of extra seasoning, but that's a personal thing I suppose. We were seated at two tables (Biedjee's plan of putting the tables together didn't work when another few people he had forgotten about walked in...:-P) There was good conversation, we all had a good laugh and after dinner was finished some people moved around the table to be able to talk to some other people. Even the money situation worked itself out fine so Devika needn't have worried. Shame the restaurant didn't make more of an effort to accommodate us with that and they made such a big deal about some constructive critisism I offered and didn't really apologise for the plastic that was still stuck on Marianne's potato, but we had fun and that is all that matters!

After dinner Femke and I raced to the train station to catch our train home.

It was good to get to know Femke a little better as so far I hadn't really spoken to her before even though we had already met at the Friesland meet-up last year...We were able to travel together to Deventer and then Femke had to change trains while I got to stay in the same train a little bit longer until I had to change in Zwolle. Unfortunately I had to wait there for almost 45 minutes for my train home, so it was around 2am before my head hit my pillow...