Mud, mud, mud, mud......


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Posted by Pam Adams on August 16, 2004 at 17:17:15 from 134.71.192.235 user PamAdams.

From Sunday's Los Angeles Times Travel Section:

Becoming one with the mud

By Candice Reed, Special to The Times

I flew all the way to the Netherlands to play in the mud.

Of course, I didn't know that at the time; all I planned to do was relax. And for a week I did, spending my time in the Friesland province in the northern part of the country visiting relatives, snapping photographs of cows and sheep and contemplating windmills.

The day before my sludge adventure began, I sat contentedly in a cafe along a canal in the medieval village of Dokkum. An 18th century windmill was nearby, slowly turning in the wind. Life was good.

That was before I learned about the strange, dirty pastime of wadlopen, or mud walking. It was my husband Ralph's idea. His uncle Dick, our host in Dokkum, had told him about the rather odd pursuit of wadlopen while I kicked back in the village, unaware of the conversation.

The Dutch find the idea of hiking along the muddy bottom of the Waddenzee — a North Sea inlet — so much fun that more than 40,000 of them are lured each year to the Dutch provinces of Friesland and Groningen. They come at low tide — usually between May and September — to brave the muddy, murky sea bottom and trudge from the coast to islands a few miles away. More than 3,000 square miles of gleaming mud flats and the sea surround them as they slip and slide their way across the Waddenzee.

Rest of the article can be found at www.latimes.com, under Travel.

pam




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