I am a Belgian amateur mineral collector. After first contacts with a mineral club, I started in 1984 with some fieldwork, without any knowledge of geology nor mineralogy. The first trip I made was a visit to the stone pit of Resteine.
After a while I found my geology soulmate named Omer, and each weekend we came together to go on a trip to hunt for minerals. In our own country (Belgium) we went from La Calemine up to Bastenaken. After a while we expanded our boundaries and went to France, Germany and Luxembourg. In 1991, we decided to take a trip to Sweden to search for minerals and we coupled this visit on the opportunity to meet Ingemar Johanson. He appeared to be a fantastic collector and I traded a lot of minerals with him, of which names I had never heard. We also visited Lavrion, Greece, where we made acquaintance with Cristos Kapellas, he taught us to search for minerals in the mines of Lavrion. Afterwards we visited Sweden and Greece several different times and therefore Omer and I now have a beautiful collection from various mineral searching sites.
My wife and I also made a few distant travels to Brazil, Chile and California. Our last big trip took us to Mexico where we visited Juan Angel Tort which I got to know via Mindat. He took us to Mapimi, Durango and other mineral searching sites. During these travels, I had the opportunity and the luck to receive several minerals by searching them myself and buying them.
I already also attended a lot of mineral exchange fairs which are very interesting to obtain new versions and other types of minerals.