The daily walk show

One of the few upsides of the current lockdown we're undergoing here in the Netherlands is the amount of walking I seem to be doing. While I don't make New Year's resolutions as a rule – mainly because I'd never keep them for more than about a month – I did decide to try and make time for a daily walk, at least all the while we can't go anywhere else. A sort of resolution, then.

The reason for my more determined than normal efforts is because I have trouble enough with enduring winter, and since we haven't been able to go to Portugal this January as we'd planned, I'm missing my winter dose of Vitamin D in the Algarve sunshine. Okay, I know I'm not going to get much of that here, but at least by going out for a walk every day, I'm getting something of what's going, aren't I? And actually, we've had a few lovely days recently.

My aim has been to walk 4kms every day and so far, I'm managing to do it. I like walking although I confess I haven't done as much as I used to since Sindy (beloved pooch) died, so now I'm feeling quite proud of my efforts. Some days my distance calculator has said I've been a bit under the 4kms, so the next day I've walked a bit further to make up for it. The only snag is the mud that's everywhere at the moment. We've had so much rain all the country paths are like wading through a quagmire and as I don't have boots made for that kind of walking, I'm sticking mostly to the roads. Still, now and then I've taken the plunge – quite literally once – and hopscotched my way through the puddles or skirted round the knee-deep tractor tracks. The plunge part was when I miscalculated the depth of one of these muddy pools and ended up ankle deep in slush. That was fun – not.

The best motivation for getting up and out there has been the opportunity to take photos of our surroundings. I've got a new camera, thanks (very much) to Koos, which is a delight to use and I can just slip it into my coat pocket when I go out. It's a little Panasonic compact but it has a whopping 30 x optical zoom, which is fantastic for those long distance shots of barges disappearing into the haze. I've been after this particular model for ages; it isn't the latest one, but I read all the reviews and it has everything I personally want, especially a really excellent lens. With my camera as inspiration, I started posting my daily snaps on Twitter, which a few people seem to like. However, because my blog is my favourite place on the net and since I can't possibly let Twitter have it all, I thought I'd add some of them here too. 

So, dear readers, here's a collection of my most recent daily walk photos. I have to admit they're in no particular order because Blogger just seems to ignore the sequence in which I post them, but never mind. It actually doesn't matter, although the snowy one was the first photo I took with my camera (It was snowing at the time, hence the haze!).

The day it snowed

I love docks and cranes

Quaint village street

This lake is an old creek from the days when the land was
submerged when the tide came in

Practicing my zoom. Those houses were about 1.8kms from
where I was standing. I'm impressed.

This was testing the zoom as well

On our great sea canal

A nearby nature reserve after the rains, much as the
land would have looked before drainage

Another zooming effort

Typically Dutch

And, of course, there have to be boats

This one was one I took with my phone, but
I just happen to like it. on Blogger, I can't really
see the difference, but I can on my photo program.

Well, that's it for this week, allemaal. We're coping, surviving the restrictions and hoping all these efforts will result in freedom to move around more when the spring comes. Let's hope it does. Meanwhile, I'll just focus on my three Ws: working, walking and writing!

Keep well and look after yourselves!