Day 16: Wachtendonk 🇩🇪 - 🇳🇱 Barendrecht

Sometimes the day starts calmly… and goes pear-shaped in your underwear. This morning we hadn't seen a soul. The place was as quiet as the night before. Silence, forest, birds. Daddy Edu thought: "this is the ideal moment to get ready a bit". And he took out the scissors, the shaver and the soap, with the intention of doing a combo of hairdressing and shower in the wild, naked next to the camper.

But of course, the universe has a sense of humor. Just when Daddy had stayed in Adam pre-Eve mode, humans started to arrive. Humans with dogs. Humans wanting to walk. Humans with eyes. So the shower turned into a festival of hiding behind the door, shaving the beard in a hurry and throwing himself inside the camper before traumatizing half the region.

After that adrenaline-filled start, we left around ten o'clock. The plan was clear: heading west, as it was time to go back to Holland. But it wasn't a happy road. The highways in the Netherlands are more crowded than a bed shared with three cats. Trucks everywhere, constant traffic, and everything flat and gray. Daddy Edu, who you know falls asleep just thinking about highways, had to stop a couple of times to wake up. Safety first, even when the landscape invites you to close your eyes rather than contemplate it.

Near Tilburg, we made a longer stop. We found a nice little forest where we ate in the camper. I supervised from my mat while daddy chewed his strange salad. Then we took a walk among trees, more for mental hygiene than for tourism. It was good for me to move my legs and review all the marked trunks.

After the break, we faced the last stretch to Barendrecht, the headquarters of family emotions. We arrived at five, and the reception was a canine red carpet: Britte, my little human friend, welcomed me as if there were no dogs in the whole country. Then Tita Wilma appeared, and after a while Lars and finally Tito Antonio came. How many familiar smells! I felt like at the Goya awards, but with more caresses and fewer speeches.

In the afternoon we all went for a walk near Tito Antonio's house. We walked along a beautiful dike and through open fields, with that Dutch light that makes everything look like a museum painting. Well, everything except the cows. The cows on that dike looked at us strangely. Very strange. And of course, when they look at me like that, I bark. And when I bark... they run! And when they run, daddy gets scared. And when daddy gets scared, he looks at me as if I had turned on the nuclear alarm. But we survived. Everyone. Even the cows.

At nightfall we went back home, and as tradition dictates, we left the camper in front of the house, in our mobile rest plot. We have slept here many times, and although it doesn't have spectacular views or wild forests, it smells like home. Well, it also smells a little like French cheese, but that's another matter.

Now I stretch out along the hallway, with a full belly, clean paws and a happy heart. Tomorrow we'll see. But today... today we went home.