Italy

Flight from Catania to Rome to Amsterdam on ITA and KLM.

Fred is a star and picks me up at Schiphol. We have lunch at his house, nice bread and cheese, so Dutch. Broodje kaas! He is looking great for going through chemo. For the last three years he has been fighting cancer, lost his wife due to a fall down the stairs in his house and despite all that he keeps a strong defiant attitude towards his situation with a lot of humor to boot. Great to see him it had been a very long time.

But Fred and Jan are not talking due to a loan, so I'm having dinner with Rob and Jan. It's our once a year or so dinner as I visit Europe. A few months ago Jan had a heart attack and three operations. He's looking pretty good considering what he just went through. But you can tell he has been through some pretty hard health times. He is also under a lot of stress with the bar that he runs. Rob is doing okay but he does smoke a ton. We had our usual dinner talking about family and life dynamics, keeping things in the complicated side. But that's been the conversational pattern at our dinners for decades. Seems to be a family trait to have disrupted ties between family members.

It was great to see them again and Rob drops me off at Fred and stays a while to talk to him. I'm finding out more about how things work in the Netherlands and it's definitely not a country I would want to return to to live because fiscally everything is extremely complicated.

It is now agreed that I should come back for more than just a fly through, stay to hang with them a bit longer and I think I will do another bicycle trip in Europe and start it in Amsterdam.

Holland is playing England in the quarter finals, the winner plays Spain.Read more