October 29th to 31st, 1999
Henri invited us all to come to Apeldoorn in the last weekend of October 1999, after months of e-mailing about the subject. Henri and I have been friends already since 1995. I had met Hein some months before in Groningen. But Henri and Hein had never met before, and none of us knew Verena. We all travelled to Apeldoorn in the evening of Friday October 29th, 1999, Hein by train from Amsterdam, I by train from Groningen, and Verena by car from Bergkamen, Germany. Finally at Henri's house we started talking and didn't stop until somewhere halfway the night. That weekend we visited Palace Het Loo and enjoyed the gardens on Sunday, the last day of the season they were opened. At the end of the weekend we still hadn't stop talking, mostly about royalty. It was wonderful finally meeting other people interested in royalty. We all left at the end of the weekend, but knew we would meet again.
July 7th to 9th, 2000
On the occasion of the wedding of Prince Bernhard van Oranje-Nassau, Van Vollenhoven and Annette Sekrève we decided to meet each other for the second time. As the religious wedding was going to take place in Utrecht, it was the best to meet in Apeldoorn again. After a night in which we didn't sleep that much because we talked a lot, we headed for Utrecht by train early in the morning. The report can be read here. On Sunday we paid a visit to Palace Het Loo and watched the newest exhibition with things out of the Japanese Imperial Collection.
