the weather?! rain. and rain. some more rain. ah, and rain. by the way, its cold too. summer? noooo, not at all. feels more like autumn. buuuhhhh. i cannot remember for how long the weather is really crappy now, but its been quite a while. and its still raining. the past week we mostly had rain. and this weekend we had some. we were in Groningen, as i really wanted to go to a special happening on saturday evening. despite the forecasts, the weather was actually not too bad on saturday. we went shopping a bit in the city center. then we quickly went home, had a small dinner and rushed out again for the main event of the weekend, and something i seriously had looked forward too. not in the least as i would finally take some pictures again...
we biked 10 kms to a pasture somewhere outside groningen. there it would happend; the hot-air balloon festival. last year it was so crowded that police at some point asked people not to come anymore. in the morning we had read that despite the rain, the event would take place. and well, during the day we hardly had any rain, so we just went. the maximum-allowable-number-of-hot-air-balloons-in-the-netherlands would fill the air. and some would have funny shapes. jeeejjjj!! when we arrived (a bit late, we were worried it had already started), quite some people were about to leave. why? we asked. look, they said, and pointed to the sky (it might be that people from groningen speak less than people from amsterdam). oopps, it was indeed quite dark suddenly... but... the organizers announced that there was a chance it would still happen, so we waited. walked around a bit. and then... at the moment the organizers announced the entire thing was blown off because of bad weather and thunderstorms and what not, rain came indeed down like crazy. luckily we had one small umbrella and just stood there, like many others, waiting for it to stop..... (some people even found shelter in the dixies standing around, ugh....) while waiting i took this picture, as you can see the sky doesnt look too bad, but right behind and above us was quite a different story. and well.... merely 45 minutes after we arrived we biked back again, no hot air balloons for us.... just a little more rain while biking... :(
