About Me

Two things have always interested me since I was a little girl – architecture (old and new) and travelling. Luckily, the Dutch seem to have been born with travel blood, so after my education (construction engineering and architectural history), I spent a year in Australia. Having not got rid of the travel bug at my return, I worked for four years to save up enough money for another trip.

This second trip would again take me to Australia, but having decided I didn’t want to fly, I booked a passage on a container ship instead. The journey from Rotterdam to Perth took 28 days and the experience made me a fan of slow-travel for life. After spending another year in Australia and six months in New Zealand, I took a container ship back home to Europe. This time the journey took two months.

Having seen on the ships that getting tourist information was rather dependent on the moods of the captains, I offered my services as a writer to the shipping company, hoping they would give me some free trips onboard their ships, in exchange for writing some guidebooks for their passengers. They thought it was a great idea, so again I embarked their ships, this time as an employee.

After two more journeys on container ships (both three months long), I moved to York, United Kingdom, a city I had fallen in love with during a holiday trip. The history and architecture of my new hometown sparked my imagination, which resulted in two books – Romans, Vikings, Churches and Chocolate and From Dissenters to Fire Engines.

In the autumn of 2008, I moved back to the Netherlands, where I have since written Time Zones, Containers and Three Square Meals a Day, which is an account of my adventures on the container ships and will be published in Sept-Oct 2010.

In March 2010 I embarked on a quest to find out more about my family’s connection to St Radbod, a man who was bishop of Utrecht and lived in the 9th century. In my Saint in the Family blog I write about my quest adventures. In the meantime I am also doing research for a book about post-war architecture in the Netherlands.