Pyrenees Trip - April 2006

Well, that's all I have of this wonderful trip! It will stay in our minds and hearts for years to come. When I think about this trip, I feel this is the kind of experience that build life up in a special way. I believe we should just create more of these... Again thanks to my mom for organizing such a complicated task! Thanks to Mir for coming through with this in the first place, so we could then want to reproduce it and dare try and feel how she did... She's a real heroine!

We stopped an extra night at a small town somewhere in Catalunya. They had an openair play of a chapter in the bible. If I recall it was the Last Supper. Vincent took some pretty cool photos!

When we got to a certain point downhill, our men came to pick us up with the cars and we pursued the walk. We found a few Dolmens, which have a special meaning, because it was in one that Mir and the kids would hide during the day, to not be seen by the the Nazis. During the night they would walk the mountain with a local guide that would cross people. Mir had a little bottle with liquor she would give the guide to maintain him warm. She carried Elsa in her arms and Hugo and Louise would walk down. This lasted 3 days if I recall correctly.

Going down...

Okay, we made it! From the Lodge to the Spanish border, only 20 minutes!

Other beautiful photographs...

We had come up, but now we needed to come back down. The kids adn husbands left in the guy's truck and we came down the Spanish border.

Angelina & Nicolai's love...

Dani filming, with the intention of doing a documentary maybe someday...

Us listening...

Here's Hugo storytelling... this was a beautiful experience. He was trying to recall all the details of the time when he was an 8 year old boy and he crossed the Pyrenees, escaping from WWII

Storytelling time... first Dani and I, mimicking my mom! We are just saying how, since we are little girls, she could tell us "Let's go girls, we want to get to the other side, all we need to do is cross this wild river; but Ingy we don't know how to swim; excellent, a good time to learn! Come on girls, this is really nothing, nothing to be afraid of!". It was a parody to the previous's day adventure!

This is the next day... the night we got there, we felt like the luckiest set of human beings. We were fed warm food, we hadn't died on the way there, we actually found other human beings! This is how scary it got towards the end of the hike. A few of us wanted to accuse my mom (she was the organizer), but the truth is, she did an excellent job! Thank you Inger for organizing one of the most incredible adventures we've done!

The trip that was suppose to be 2 hours long ended up being almost 6 hours!!! It was 11pm and we were lost in the middle of the Pyrenees, already imagining the wild pigs attacking us! These cows were the first sign of life we had seen in a long time. We had lost our trail, it was dark, the kids couldn't handle it anymore and nor could we. At that moment, when we were all about to start attacking each other, we found a road!!! A few minutes later, we found the Lodge that were we were going to sleep!

Here's some of the scenery on the way there. The kids (Angelina, Dane and Sofía) walked the whole way! 5 hours up the mountain! They were like goats... not even complaining for the most of it. When we came back home from this trip, Sofía had a school trip to a mountain site with the school for a whole WE. As soon as she started climbing the mountain, she got sick. When she got home she had 40 of fever for a couple of days!! After that, she didn't want to see a mountain again for a while!

Here we are finally going up. I want you to please notice the happy grin on Hugo's face!

Just to add up to the full house, Sharon and Martin came to visit also! Here we are all of us at the magical fountain in Barcelona (Plaza España) as well as in Tossa de Mar...

Us all, enjoying at the Parc de Catalunya, in Sabadell...

A few sleeping beauties...

I will start with a few photos of the pre-adventure. When my sisters Dani and Nikki & Co had arrived to Barcelona. I will show some photos of all of us at our place in Sabadell...

This was one of the coolest adventures we've done! It was something my parents had talked about for such a long time, and it suddenly came possible. We were trying to reproduce the escape, my stepgrandmother, Myriam and her 3 kids, Louise, Hugo and Elsa had done during the 2nd World War to get away from France and rejoin her husband and father, Alexander van Dobben in Venezuela, where he had been sent of by the Dutch governement as a Consul, away from the Nazis.

We should thank my mom for making this happen. She gathered the information, about moreless where they had crossed over (the Pyrenees) and figured how it was possible to do so today. The participants in this adventure, were: Nikki, Rob, Dane, Angelina, Danielle, Hugo, Inger, Nicolai, Vincent, Vanessa and Sofía.