How to be HAPPY!, 2

Jay, over at the Depp Effect, started a new meme: How to be HAPPY!
It’s quite simple, so if you are one of those people who likes to share the little things in life that make/made you happy, and you want to spread the happiness (oh, ugh, that sounds far to sweet), join in. Here’s the brief:

‘How to be HAPPY!’ is a brand new meme. It’s about finding the little things in life which bring a smile or a glow of warmth to our hearts and souls during our daily lives. Why? Because it’s the way all these little things add up which truly determines if we are happy people, not the big stuff like a lottery win.

To enter, write a post about one thing which has made you happy in some small way recently – it could be birdsong, a favourite smell, a particularly good loaf of bread, a blue sky, anything! Then scroll to the bottom, click the Mr Linky graphic and add your blog post details to the Linky which will appear in a new window, and you’re in.

As you might have guessed, I’m in!

What made me happy recently? Well, there was this:

One particular morning in the beginning of December 2012, the light was rather beautiful. So I grabbed my camera and went outside to take some photographs and try to capture the golden sunlight that gave the fields and trees opposite our house a warm glow.

It was a Sunday morning and it was very quiet. Lovely. I took some photos of the field right opposite our house and decided to take some shots of the view a little bit further down the road. And as I walked along the field I noticed something odd.

There was a mug standing on one of the fence posts surrounding the field.

That was weird. I was pretty sure the mug didn’t belong to one of the cows, nor did it belong to me. And there was no other human being in sight. Yet… someone must have left it there. I’ll translate what it says on the mug, because that was what made me smile:

“You’re looking good and you’re getting more charming each year.”

Isn’t that nice? Someone left a very complimentary mug on a fence post. For me? Of course. Just for me (in my dreams). How very, very nice of that someone. How did he (must have been a he, and a very handsome he too) know that I’d be there, taking photos of the golden sunlight? It was quite puzzling.

I decided to take a photo of the mug. And then I took some more photos of the fields. And then one of the neighbours, who’d been walking his dog, approached. “Hi, it’s a beautiful morning isn’t it?’, he said. “Hmm, it is. And what made the morning even more beautiful’, I smiled, ‘is that someone left a very complimentary mug on one of the fence posts.’

‘Yep, that was me’, he said. ‘I often take a coffee with me when I’m walking the dog and when the mug is empty I just leave it here and pick it up on the way back. Actually, the mug belongs to my wife.’

Okay, so that did shatter my dream. But still, it did make me smile before I knew the true story of the mystery mug.

‘How to be HAPPY’

Jay, over at the Depp Effect, has started a brand new meme: ‘How to be HAPPY’.
Here’s the brief:

‘How to be HAPPY!’ is a brand new meme. It’s about finding the little things in life which bring a smile or a glow of warmth to our hearts and souls during our daily lives.  Why?  Because it’s the way all these little things add up which truly determines if we are happy people, not the big stuff like a lottery win.

To enter, write a post about one thing which has made you happy in some small way recently – it could be birdsong, a favourite smell, a particularly good loaf of bread, a blue sky, anything! Then scroll to the bottom, click the Mr Linky graphic and add your blog post details to the Linky which will appear in a new window, and you’re in.

I’m in!

Winning the lottery would probably make me happy, why not, but it isn’t very likely to happen as I never buy a lottery ticket. So my happiness is pretty much dependent on the smaller things in life that make me smile.

Here’s something that made me HAPPY:

At the funfair in Groningen last September I saw these ladies who were fanatically trying to win a cuddly toy. It was the unexpectedness of seeing the two middle-aged bums sticking out and seeing how focussed these girls were, that made me smile. I just had not expected two middle aged, practical types to really ‘go for’ something like this.
Notice the little bear, hanging above the ladies,showing us his bum too. So cute.

Well, it made me smile

And there I was…

… in the A&E department in hospital. Carefully holding my left wrist with my right hand, hoping the pain killers the GP had given me would kick in soon. I gave the ‘letter of recommendation’ the GP had also given me to the nurse behind the ‘Welcome To A&E, Make Yourself Comfortable, This May Take A While’ desk.
Actually, the sign above the desk just said ‘Reception’.

‘Please don’t drink or eat anything’, the nurse encouragingly said, ‘in case you’ll need an operation.’

That morning I’d fallen off my young horse. She didn’t mean to throw me off, she simply made a silly jump sideways, pretending to be startled by something and I simply forgot rule 1 of horse riding: keep one leg on each side of the horse, soles of your feet pointing towards the floor. Before I knew it, I had made a lovely butt-shaped indentation in the sand and the soles of my feet pointed towards the sky. All of me was fine, except my left wrist. That hurt a bit, but I remounted and rode for another 10 minutes or so. I then brought the horses to the field, gave coffee to a visiting friend, decided not to muck out the stables because of the sore wrist and took a book from the pile of books waiting to be read. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, so I tried to relax a bit. The wrist started to look alarmingly blue with strange swellings. I wrapped it in an elastic bandage and waited until hubs came home that evening.

He decided that I needed to ‘go see the doctor’. The doctor decided I needed to go to hospital, so hubs dropped me off there and went home to take care of the Brinkbeest-zoo and muck out the stables. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done here’, I said and there I was, in the A&E department in hospital.

It was the night of the semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest. For those of you who are not familiar with this annual event, each country that’s a member of the EBU-UER (don’t ask, I never heard of the EBU-UER, until I just tried to find out which countries can enter in the Eurovision Song Contest) chooses a singer or a band and a song to send to the contest, every country gets to vote and the one with the most votes wins (gosh, really?). Now, in recent years the country with the weirdest act has won, so almost all the other countries thought ‘we have to send weird acts too’, which made the whole event even weirder than it already was. And not weird in a good way. Just weird in a weird way.
The A&E waiting room has a television and someone had decided that we should watch the semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest. As if we weren’t suffering enough.

This was the Dutch entry in 2012. She didn’t go through to the final. I wonder why not (not).

And then there was the Irish act:

The Russian grannies came second in the final:

Actually, I believe Sweden won with a really decent song. So perhaps next year other countries will send decent singers to the contest too. Whatever. I don’t really care. If it had been an evening at home, I’d have never watched this. But I had to.

The other entertainment while waiting for my X-rays to be taken was provided by a loud woman who had brought a louder friend and four even louder kids to the A&E. The loud woman was in a wheelchair and the louder friend parked her in the waiting room and flipflopped (nice weather remember?) away to take care of the administrative side of things, while the kids flipflopped to the coffee and tea-corner and tried to get third-degree burns by making themselves tea (tea and coffee are free for the people waiting in A&E, but they serve hot water for tea and coffee in those large thermos flasks, under which you have to hold a plastic cup with one hand while pressing the top with the other hand, which even if I was allowed to drink something I couldn’t do because of the probably broken wrist. Still… a dry mouth wasn’t the worst of my problems.)

The loud woman sat in her wheelchair in the middle of the waiting room and grabbed her mobile. She started to call the first person on her list: ‘HI, IT’S ME, YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHERE I AM. I’M IN HOSPITAL. H O S P I T A L!! YES. I KNOW!
I’LL TELL YOU. I WAS CYCLING HOME AND CAME PAST THAT POND, YOU KNOW THE ONE, NEAR MY HOUSE, AND THERE WAS A SWAN AND IT FLEW UP JUST AS I PASSED AND TO AVOID IT I HAD TO MAKE A STRANGE MANOUVRE AND I FELL. AND NOW I HAVE A REALLY SORE KNEE. IT’S IN A BANDAGE. I’M IN A WHEELCHAIR. YEAH. … (name of friend) BROUGHT ME TO THE A&E AND NOW THEY ARE GOING TO TAKE X-RAYS. YEAH.. OKAY… BYE

She put down her phone. A collective sigh of relief went through the waiting room.

Then she took up her phone again and phoned the second person on her list: ‘HI, IT’S ME, YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHERE I AM….

And we all had to hear the whole story again.

By the time she called the third person to tell where she was, I and some of the other people waiting mumbled ‘swan, flew up, fell down, hurt knee, blablabla’ and we collectively sighed again. The mad woman telephoned at least 8 people and repeated the whole story VERY LOUDLY!!!!
I swear, if I had had the use of both of my hands, she’d no longer be alive. But then again, I wouldn’t have been in hospital either.

While mad woman was informing everyone where she was and why, her friend flipflopped into the waiting room again. ‘HERE!!!’, she shouted towards the kids, who had managed to survive the tea-making-adventure with only minor burns, ‘GO FIND SOMETHING TO PLAY WITH. THERE ARE TOYS IN THAT CORNER. WE’LL BE HERE FOR A WHILE!!!’

‘HEY, GUYS, IT’S THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST!’, loud woman shouted towards her friend and the kids. ‘PUT ME IN FRONT OF THE TELLY AND GET SOME CHAIRS. WE’LL WATCH IT TOGETHER. IT’S FUN!! OUR INDIAN HAS A CATCHY SONG! I KNOW ALL THE WORDS!!! I CAN’T HELP SINGING ALONG WHEN IT’S ON THE RADIO!!!’ And towards some other people in the waiting room: ‘DON’T YOU LOVE THE SONG CONTEST? I LOVE IT! I’M GOING TO SING ALONG!’ The people smiled and nodded. Rule 1 when dealing with idiots, try not to upset them. ‘CAN SOMEONE PUT THE VOLUME UP?!’

‘Oh God’, I moaned.
’Is your arm very painful?’, the man sitting next to me asked concerned.
’Yep, that too’, I smiled.
’Oh’, he understood, ‘They are rather loud aren’t they.’
We leaned back in our chairs and tried to not be there.

Finally it was my turn to get the arm X-rayed and to see a doctor and then the arm was put in plaster and then I phoned hubs and then he came to get me out of there. Hooray!

So…

…here I am and here you are. And they say coincidence doesn’t exist .

I promised some of you a story about a concert we went to, which was about the only blogworthy thing that happened in the past few months. Apart from me breaking my wrist that is of course. Perhaps I’ll tell you all the fun things surrounding that event later.

First the story about the concert. Not an exciting story mind you. I just want to share that wonderful evening with you.

One Friday evening a friend telephoned: ‘we’re going to a concert on the lake tomorrow. We’re sailing the boat to the lake tomorrow morning, will moor it in the harbour near the yacht club and then at around 6 in the evening we’re sailing towards the podium they’ve built on the other side of the lake. Like to join us?’

‘Yeaheah, of course we’re joining you. Thanks for inviting us. Who else is coming?’ She mentioned a couple of people we (hubs and I) knew too. It promised to be an evening to remember.

So well before 6 o’clock that Saturday evening we were at the harbour, found the boat and were greeted by our friends. Everybody had brought a couple of bottles of wine, except for one guy who had brought 4 cases of 6 bottles; 2 cases of red and 2 cases of white wine. He must have been thirsty. It promised to be an evening we wouldn’t remember.

So we set off to the other side of the lake, where a floating podium had been built on the lake and where the Haydn Youth Orchestra would give a concert with guest appearances of students of the local conservatory and singer Izaline Calister (she sings a jazzy kind of South American style of music).

Can’t tell you how lovely that evening was. We drank wine (not the entire shipload mind you), ate quiches, French cheeses and bread, Turkish bread and hummus, salads…

I hadn’t brought my camera because of my physical incapability to shoot photos anyway, but fortunately hubs has an i-Phone (research has been done to find out what people use their phones for and amazingly actually phoning someone was only 5th on the list) and he took some photos I can show you. 

The podium was built on a part of the lake that is surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings and some of the balconies had small groups of conservatory students on them who gave their own mini-concerts, woven into the main musical event.

 

All kinds of small boats (big ones don’t have access to this lake) were still arriving…

The concert was wonderful, the youth orchestra played some really beautiful classical pieces, Izaline sang and had everyone dancing (who knew Dutch hips could swing like that), a really fat bloke who had one drink too many fell from the boat next to us (not in one of the photos sadly) into the fortunately shallow water and kept swinging, hands in the air, up to his armpits in the lake, as if nothing had happened.

It was such a pleasant evening and when the concert ended late that night it was still exceptionally warm and we sailed back to the harbour, looking back to where the concert was…

Kicking!

And alive too. Sorry for being a bad blogger. I blame it on the broken wrist which made typing difficult. And also nothing blogworthy happened. Anyway… that’s my excuse. I’m no longer plastered (haha) now, but the hand and wrist aren’t working properly yet, so I have to visit a physiotherapist regularly. Sigh.

To make it up to you, I’ll post some photos (I can finally hold the camera again) that I took with the macro lens. As soon as I can find the time to read up on you all, I will. And I do hope all of you, my dear blogfriends, are fine. I’ve missed you all, but it’s my own fault. I know.

The creatures below visit my garden. They are a hoverfly, damselfly and very small grasshopper.

i laughed

 

a friend came to visit the poor patient with the broken wrist (me) and brought her two eldest daughters (8 and 4) and the, also 8 year old, boyfriend of the eldest with her. the boyfriend introduced himself to hubs: ‘hello, i’m connor.’
’hi connor’, said hubs. ‘so you are amy’s boyfriend?’
’yes’, connor nodded, ‘and i’m very good at it!’

 

mozes and biggles are friends too

Broken

my wrist that is. can’t be bothered with capitals since i’m typing with 2 fingers of my right hand now. the other hand is neatly wrapped up in plaster. only a plaster splint for now to allow space for swelling and then next week they’ll fit me with a nice coloured plaster (i’m thinking orange because of the olympics which i like watching and it will also make me very popular with people who love football/soccer, which i don’t care about at all, but that information will be purely given out on a need-to-know-basis). i will have to wear that for 6 weeks and if not all is well by then i can choose another (or the same) colour for another 6 weeks. apparently i broke a tiny bone with a long name that has a reputation for being a bad healer. fingers crossed it will behave in my wrist.

so. that is why i will have one white and one brown arm at the end of summer.

will have to do what petje does best, just relax and enjoy the sun.

Something blogworthy happened…

…and now I can only type with one hand and don’t have the patience to type the entire short story. So I’ll make it even shorter. I made a lovely butt shaped indentation in the sand again (2nd time involuntary descent from young and incredibly-quick-turn-around Evie) and also a lovely hand shaped one. Must have done, because my wrist hurts like hell. Can’t really remember how I landed. The rest of me is fine, I did climb up and rode her further for a while. Went well. But now ouch.

So… i’ll just keep posting photos here and on my photoblog (see link at bottom of this page).

Something blogworthy turned out to be something shit. Sorry if you’re offended by my language.

I’ll make it up to you with this photo of Biggles and Mozes. Best friends.

Sunday Selections #70: The incredibly creepy edition

Sunday Selections is hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock and is thé place to post those photos that have been hanging around on your computer for far too long and need to be seen by other bloggers. Or something like that. Hop over to Kim’s rocking frog ponds and join in if you like.

I’m not always really following the rules to the letter, but Kim doesn’t mind. To make it up to her I’ll post some photos of Lovebirds or Ladybirds or whatever you call them in your country. We call them Lieveheersbeestjes. They are not incredibly creepy of course. BUT… I just thought I’d warn you. There’s also a photo of a spider. Just so you know. I’ll start with the cute ones:

This is a 14-dotted one. Not to be confused of course with the 14-spotted one, which is a much rarer kind of ‘lieveheersbeestje’. I’m not kidding.

Back end. The entire creature, not only its back end, is tinier than the ‘normal’ red/black ones. About two millimetres head-to-tail at the most.

 

Don’t worry, he made it.

 

And he’s saying ‘Hi Kim!’. Or ‘look mama, no hands!’.

 

I’m glad I’m not the mother of this daredevil.

And now a really scary, but also rather beautiful photo, if I may say so myself, of a spider. So don’t look if you’re suffering from even a mild case of arachnophobia. Do not be curious. Just look away. 

 

 

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

 

 

It caught a fly, beheaded the poor victim and is probably saving that best part for last. When I checked this photo on my computer and saw that eye looking back at me it did send shivers down my spine. And I’m not even scared of spiders.

Anyway… wishing you all a nice week and I promise that when something blogworthy happens, I’ll tell you all about it. Life has been incredibly boring, but also quite relaxed. As far as working my ass off in the garden can be considered to be ‘relaxed’.

Sunday Selections #69: The bench edition

Sunday Selections, hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock, is the place to post those photos that have been hanging around on your computer for far too long and that need to be seen and enjoyed by fellow bloggers.

So, here’s my selection for this Sunday: I’m trying to make a series of photos of people who use the bench opposite our house to give their bums a much needed rest from cycling through the countryside. I’ve managed to take four shots on a sunny Sunday in April and it is far more interesting to look at them than I first thought it would be. I mean… they are just people sitting on a bench. How interesting can it be? And yet… they speak to me:

He’s soooo relaxed, but she wants to know and see everything that’s going on.

 

 

They are prepared for everything! And she leads.

 

 

Now, you have to understand that I don’t want them to see me taking their photo, so I sneak out of the garden gate, take a shot and quickly disappear again. But this woman, she just didn’t park her posterior on that bench. She just stood there, looking at our house. And there I was, hiding behind the ivy that surrounds our garden gate, waiting until she finally would turn around and just sit! After ages, I just gave up and went inside. Of course at that point she turned around an sat down. So I quickly took this shot through the window next to our front door. Which is why it is a rather poor quality shot.

He clearly needed this rest, his posture says ‘phew’. She can’t wait to stand up again. And look at his glasses. What’s with those?

 

Now, they are cute. Notice the non-existing space between them and compare that to the other photos. Sweet. And they clearly love blue. Aww…

 

And just for fun I though I’d add some macro shots. Have I mentioned I love my macro lens (I know I have. Lots of times. But hey… I do.)

Inspirational and weird

So, remember I said that nothing blogworthy happened here? Well… still nothing blogworthy actually happened here. But! Karen posted something very blogworthy and truly amazing and that reminded me of a story our farrier told. But first you have to hop over to Karen to see what she posted. I’ll wait patiently until you’re back here… pom pom pom… pom de pom de pom pom pom…

So… what did you think of that then? Weird non?

Now, here’s the story our farrier told me yesterday. I’ll tell you the story using his voice. Imagine a deep manly voice here: “Last week I was driving to a client. The sky was heavily overcast. At one point the clouds opened up to let the sun shine through and that hole in the clouds… that hole… it had exactly the shape of a shark! (*)

(I have to tell you something first. Our farrier often experiences things that later explain themselves. For instance: he and a couple of his friends went on a short vacation to Portugal. They had rented an apartment, but there weren’t enough bedrooms. He didn’t want to share a bed with one of his friends so he volunteered to sleep on the couch for those couple of nights. And while he lay on that couch, trying to get some sleep, he got to intimately know the rough stones the living room wall was made of. And one of those stones had the shape of the back of the head of a guy with a band of hair above his ears but the top of his head was bald (are you imagining that picture?). So he thought that it was weird that one of these stones so clearly had this very recognizable shadowy shape in it. And the incredibly stunning end of that story was that on the flight back to the Netherlands, a guy in the seat in front of him was the spitting image of the shape in the wall of the living room in the apartment! And every time farrier visits us, he tells a similar story. So I knew that an explanation of the shark-shaped hole in the clouds would follow. Either one day in the future, or perhaps it had explained itself already.)

“Wow!”, I said. “A shark shaped hole! Weird. And are you expecting an explanation for this weird occurrence?”

”That’s what I thought. We were going out for dinner that evening, so I thought that there would be fried shark on the menu, or something like that. But no! In fact, at that point I was on my way to Dr. Sharky (*). Hehehehehe (he giggles like a girl).

We both giggled like a girl in fact. Because it was a weird coincidence and I thought it was funny too. But now Karen posted her shape in the sky and it makes me think. I’m going to keep a good eye on the sky tomorrow and my camera within reach. Because this coincidence will explain itself. I’m sure. Pretty sure at least.

(*) I had to translate the name of Dr. Sharky who is actually called Dr. Haaier, because a shark is ‘haai’ in Dutch. So the farrier saw a hole in the shape of a ‘haai’ and he was on his way to Dr. Haaier. Confused? You will be, after the next episode of SOAP. (Remember SOAP? Loved that show. Not that it has anything to do with the above story.)

Sunday Selections #63: the bee’s knees edition

It’s Sunday again. Time for the Sunday Selections, hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock. They do, you know.
Anyway, if you have tons of photos hanging around in your computer somewhere, waiting for a reason to be shown to the blogging world, hop over to the rocking frog ponds and follow the almost non-existent rules for joining in.

This Sunday Selections being my bee’s knees edition; Kim is Queen of the Bee’s Knees! She participated in ‘the worlds greatest shave’ to raise money for a leukaemia foundation. Not only Kim’s frog ponds rock, she does too! Follow the above links to her blog and see the evidence for yourself.

And Kim… you look really good with short hair!

 

So, back to the Sunday Selections; I did take some photographs of buzzing bees this week that I thought you might like:

Sunday Selections #62: the ‘if this doesn’t bring a smile to your face’ edition

It’s Sunday again. Time for the Sunday Selections, hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock. They do, you know.
Anyway, if you have tons of photos hanging around in your computer somewhere, waiting for a reason to be shown to the blogging world, hop over to the rocking frog ponds and follow the almost non-existent rules for joining in.

Sorry for not being here last week, but I’ve been busy with all sorts of other things and also the Lyme is playing up, making me extremely tired. So tired, that I have difficulty even talking, let alone translating my words into English *sigh*. It’s an on-and-off thing, the Lyme. Sometimes it’s here, most of the time it isn’t.

This week I’m posting some photos that will hopefully bring a smile to your face. I took them at the first birthday party of three young friends of mine. Cute guys they are. Even though one of them was still recovering from a really bad case of chicken-pox, he still had his happy face on.

These two boys (yes, you’re right, they are twins) are a hilarious double-act.  

In full admiration for their sister who is doing the ‘farting-dance’ that comes with lots of butt-wiggling and raspberry blowing sound effects. She’s almost a double-act all by herself.

Ah… young love… (they are not brother and sister, before you think that weird things are normal in the Netherlands)

The cake tasted good!

Sunday Selections #60: The ‘longing for spring’ edition

It’s Sunday again. Time for the Sunday Selections, hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock. They do, you know.
Anyway, if you have tons of photos hanging around in your computer somewhere, waiting for a reason to be shown to the blogging world, hop over to the rocking frog ponds and follow the almost non-existent rules for joining in.

This Sunday I thought I’d get into spring-mood again and just randomly pick some photos from a folder dated May 2009. Our first foal was born in April 2009 and she, her mom and our other horse stayed for about 6 weeks with the horses and foals of friends in luscious green meadows nearby. The first two photos I shot there. The last three are of our garden and are mainly there to remind me that it will look like that again soon, for it is now in a sorry, muddy state.
Each winter I lose faith and cannot believe that it will ever look pretty, green and flowery again. And each spring I’m proved wrong.
So, this year I’m keeping the faith! And my fingers crossed.

Army adventures: part 2

See for part 1 the previous post.

So, there we were. Driving up and down Vanessa (you should really read part 1) and having fun, still keeping Bob pretty clean and alive (I can only repeat that you should read part 1), when we saw this car coming towards us:

We know the guy behind the wheel, he'd invited us to this event, and he clearly didn’t give a shit (if you’re offended, I’m sorry) about keeping his car clean. Perhaps the fact that this isn’t really his car, but it is owned by Landrover had something to do with that. Anyway, who cares. They clearly were having fun. He’d brought his sons to the event and kept them in the back of the car. Obviously there were no health-and-safety-people around. I mentioned to Landrover guy that it was perhaps a little dangerous to keep the kids in the open back of the car without seatbelts, but he answered: “Don’t worry, they are holding on tight.” Which was true.

So they ‘did’ Vanessa a couple of times too:

…and had a lot of fun. Just like these guys who were thrilled to see that I was taking photos:

…and these people who kept their van together with what looked like a huge elastic band:

And then the entire Dutch army turned up to see if everything was okay:

(Just joking: this isn’t the entire Dutch army. In case you were planning to invade us. I’m pretty sure there are more people involved in keeping our country safe.)

And then we moved on, into the woods again, to find another exciting spot for me to take photos. We arrived at another muddy patch and I was just getting ready to get out of the car and take some shots of cars driving through it, when suddenly we saw a good friend of us (who owns a couple of Landrovers too and does this sort of off-the-road driving more often) driving towards us in one of the cars owned by Landrover. He took one look at our sparkling clean Bob, saw that we were driving around in totally the wrong gear (not in dif.lock, tut tut) shook his head, got out of his car, almost dragged hubs out of Bob, jumped in, put Bob in dif.lock and before I knew what was happening we drove off.
Fortunately I had the presence of mind to immediately start taking photos:

Well… and when we came back to where hubs was left standing, friend jumped out off Bob, shoved hubs into the Landrover he was driving around the terrain, and off they went:

…and back they came. The spot where all the other cars have gathered, is a place where almost everyone got stuck and had to be winched out, much to the amusement of the people watching.
We didn’t dare to drive through that mud pit. And fortunately friend didn’t either.

So, when friend was satisfied with Bob’s muddy state, he went his way again and we went ours. Back home, because it was time to leave all the excitement behind and take care of the furry bunch.

Aww… he didn’t get to play.