Just imagine how bad the weather forecaster must have felt having to tell a whole country that it would be thirty-seven degrees again today with cloudless blue skies, a mere thirteen degrees higher than the previous best for this day. He probably felt no worse than the poor barge captain with two and a half thousand tonnes of cargo waiting to be loaded upstream while a dozen coxed fours dry roasted themselves in his lock.
It seemed that everyone in Belgium with the possible exception of ourselves was out and about near naked, cheerfully dehydrating while concurrently burning their skins to a fluorescent red. We even saw people jogging! We, in the meantime were foregoing the pleasures of active tourism and confining our movements to the minimum necessary to move between patches of shade, particularly to patches of shade that contained tables with the prospect of drinks with actual ice in them .
It may have been something in the iced tea, but at some time during the middle of the afternoon, our plans to visit Liège on Sunday fizzled, along with our desire to climb the heights of the Citadel, or to do anything else in Namur for that matter. We were suddenly overcome by a desire to move on, to leave what we hadn’t seen till next time. To unpack the oars and see what lies beyond the next lock.
No comments
Post a Comment