Avond4daagse : a daunder around town.

While some people were having fun swimming across Scotland from westcoast to eastcoast (has that been done already?) we did our annual "avond4daagse". The "avond4daagse" is a walk or daunder during 4 evenings in a row, mainly undertaken by schoolkids in the age of 6 to 12 but parents and anyone else can join also. Distances are 5, 10 or 15km and, like last year, there were approximately 1900 attenders.

We (me, my wife and kids aged 12, 10 and 6) always subscribe as individuals for the 5km. We don't like to walk with the schoolgroups for obvious reasons : too crowded, too much noise and very chaotic.

All walks start from the AW footballclub sportsground and go through the forest and heather of the district 'Het Gooi' in the Netherlands. These "avond4daagse" walks take place all around the Netherlands and have different starting points of course.

As you can see in the picture we had perfect weather for the first three days, contrary to the weather in most parts of Scotland. This drought has been going on for 8 weeks now. Only during the 4th evening there was some rain but, having started early, we finished before the rain started. The main groups got seriously wet though.

TGO Challenge 2007 : day 5

In realtime the Challenge is in it's third day now for most people. Their start was on Friday the Thirteenth and sofar the weather hasn't been too well.
It's a sort of tradition that the first days can be wet with a fresh dusting of snow on the summits. Every day I check the weather on buienradar and see a lot of showers moving quickly across Scotland.
Although the weather looks rough there can be a huge difference locally as you can read in Phreerunner's report of day 1. During my Challenge in 2007 the first day started warm with hail and snowshowers to be followed by 12 days of sunshine or clouds but hardly any rain. I'm sure this years Challengers will get sunburned somewhere along their way to the eastcoast.

For those staying at home this year I've completed my coverage of day 5 of my 2007 Challenge : from Melgarve Bothy to the Monadhliath Hotel near Laggan.

April weather statistics

Temperature
April has been extremely warm, very sunny and very dry in Holland.
With an average temperature of 13,1 dgs C. April 2011, together with April 2007, is the warmest April since meteorological observations started back in 1706. The longterm average is 9,6 C..
Total of warm days (20+ C.) is 13 and the highest recorded temperature is 27,9.

Rainfall
The average rainfall was 10mm (normally 44mm) and some areas have even less than 5mm of H2O.
March was very dry also so there's now a shortage of rainfall of 100mm.

Sunshine
The sun delivered 258 hours of sunshine, normally we have 178 hours. April 2007 still holds the record with a staggering 284 hours of sunshine.

In Holland we have a saying "April doet wat-ie wil" which best translates with "April does as April likes" meaning that April can have all seasons. This month we've seen only two seasons, spring and summer. I'm afraid it will be a crap summer (june till august) this year.