Before setting off for Bonaire we celebrated Lori's birthday. You'll notice that the cake in the picture looks surprisingly like a store-bought cake. That's because it is. However, the reason that we didn't have a delicious home made cake was because we didn't want to have a bunch of cake left over when we went on vacation. It had nothing to do with the fact that since it was Lori's birthday, I was in charge of baking (or acquiring) the cake. I can bake cakes. Really.
As a 100% full blooded Dutch person, Lori has always loved birthdays. However, one downside of being born on December 21 is that it is the winter solstice, the day where the northern hemisphere has the shortest daylight. In some locations that is not such a big deal, but in Northern Europe, shortest daylight is really short. According to the US Navy website, the sun rose over Wassenaar at 8:50 am, stayed around for a paltry 7 hours and 40 minutes before setting at 4:30 pm. Had she been born on the summer solstice, she would have enjoyed 16 hours and 45 minutes of daylight. Quite a difference between the low and high tide if you will.
Sometimes people forget how far north we are in Europe. Had Lori visited her parents in Des Moines on her birthday she would have enjoyed a balmy 9 hours and 10 minutes of daylight. To find a days length in North America that would have been equivalent to Wassenaar she would have had to travel to Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, which is about half way between Calgary and Edmonton. Needless to say, Red Deer was not on our potential vacation list.
So what did we give her for her birthday --- more daylight! We flew to Bonaire that day, leaving in the early afternoon. We flew with the sun, so she enjoyed 12+ hours of daylight. Unfortunately, we spent most of them jammed into an airplane seat. Luckily the Bonaire sunshine made up for it.
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