It’s Monday morning 6 AM and I am sitting in a hotel room in Eindhoven, looking back at a great weekend. Friday night was nothing special actually, I went to Tudou around 7 PM to pick up my wife, had a chat with Gary and then spent an hour in a traffic jam to get home. After the kids were in bed I worked a bit and packed my suitcase.
Saturday morning I took a flight to Hong Kong for a trail run with Marcel Ekkel. He is back in HK after a working as an expat in Jakarta and it was nice to catch up again. We had planned to do a 34 km trail run (stage 1-6 of the Hong Kong trail), but because we started off a bit late we only managed to run/hike 21 km before it got dark . Enough for me to be honest, I am in relatively good shape again but not in top shape yet. And running a trail means most of the route is either uphill or downhill… It was very enjoyable, amazing how much nature there still is on Hong Kong Island, just a few kilometers from one of the busiest cities in the world.
After the run we went to a gym to shower and change clothes and then had a nice dinner with some beer and a bottle of Australian Chardonnay on a terrace at IFC overlooking Hong Kong harbor. At 9:30 I had to take the Airport Express back to HK Airport in order to catch a flight to Amsterdam at 11 PM. As usual that went quickly and I even had time for a glass of champagne and some French cheese in the Air France lounge. The flight I mainly spent asleep, or at least resting. I finished a book (Super Sad Love Story, great book!) but that’s about the only thing I did during the flight.
My dad picked me up at 5:30 AM at Schiphol airport (thanks dad!) and we drove to the beach at Zandvoort straight away to go for a run. I was still tired from my run the day before and a bit jet lagged from the flight, but once I put on my running gear I felt great again. We ran from Zandvoort to IJmuiden and back over the beach and hardly saw anybody else. Seeing the sun rise over the dunes was a beautiful sight! The way back was not easy for me because of the head wind and because my upper leg muscles were still hurting from the Hong Kong run, but we managed of course.
We then drove to Hilversum for a cup of coffee at Peter Driessen’s house (Peter is Spil Games CEO) and to take a shower. He borrowed us 2 bikes so we could ride to the gold course to watch the final day of the KLM Dutch Open at the Hilversumsche Golf Club (thanks for the invite KLM!). We had a nice afternoon there, walking quite a distance on the course and enjoying good food and wine in the KLM Elite lounge.
At night Peter and I drove to Eindhoven where we had dinner. After dinner I was too tired to go for drinks, so before 10 pm I was back in my hotel room, read a couple of mails and some RSS feeds before falling into a deep sleep. I had a great weekend! I’ll be in Holland for meetings the next few days and will be back in Shanghai on Friday night.