Tall Ships

I think I must have done something wrong and am being punished for it. It's either that, or I have just extraordinarily bad luck lately. I started out quite well, starting the bus in the morning, driving to Den Helder and standing still over there. I stopped the motor and when I wanted to start it again after about half an hour, there was nothing. No lights coming on, no sounds, no nothing. Well, I'm lying, the headlights did come on, even though they were off (do you still follow?), so that was quite annoying. But other than that: absolutely nothing.

We phoned the mechanics who came out within half an hour (by then it was 09.30am) and they started looking for what was wrong. It took them over two hours to find the fault and it turned out to be some sort of fuse that was blown! Three different mechanics on the phone and about a gazillion different drivers giving their penny's worth of not-knowledge.

All this time I couldn't drive of course and the other 25 drivers had to do the job. Thousands of people were expected and therefore 26 buses (half of them articulated, so double the space) were deployed to ferry all those thousands of people to the navy-harbour, where they could see all the 'Tall Ships'. Unfortunately only a few hundred showed up, meaning all those 26 busdrivers got bored out of their brains. The thousands had parked their cars all over Den Helder, but not at the parking facilities where we were...

Today was another day, another go. But again, no thousands, only hundreds and it was boring, boring, boring, bo.... yawn.

Tomorrow I will have to do it again and I will be prepared to be bored. Then later on in the evening, I will have to go some sort of festival (Mystery Land), to ferry people back to the trainstation. However, I will have to do something there. They will be drunk, they will be high, they will be rowdy. But most importantly: they will be there!

One good thing last night though was that there were 15 drivers staying at the same hotel and we all went out for dinner. It was brilliant, it was fun and the food was good as well. My colleagues were rude, they were disgusting and it was a riot! I loved it.

Anyway, that's the last two days. It was fun, but mostly it was boring!