We both really enjoyed today, it wasn’t just the scenery and the scale of the canal, but with four locks up and ten down in the space of a dozen kilometres it really did put us in mind of France and the decade of delightful cruising we have spent there.
For the last ten days we’ve been dawdling our way through some delightful countryside and visiting memorable, if not always entirely engaging villages. When we came to the end of it all this afternoo we found ourselves briefly in a mist of wistfulness, wondering whether we shouldn’t just turn around and go back the way we came.
For reasons that we can’t quite put our fingers on, but quite possibly not wanting to spoil the memory, decided to press on and re-explore a bit of old territory, and a little new, get out of the intimate little waterway and mix it with the big boys for a bit.
At exactly the time we reached that conclusion, we also reached the intersection with the main canal, as indeed did three hundred tonnes of ship aimed right at the place we wanted to be. With a little nifty helm and throttle work we managed tuck in behind said monster without any drama, just in time to meet six hundred tonnes coming the other way. That in itself might have been OK, had another (empty) twelve hundred tonner not appeared at precisely the same moment in our rear-view mirror (or would have if we had had one), and as empty monster ships do, travelling very much faster than a certain little blue boat.
Just about anything else one can think of travels faster than we do, so it wasn’t very long at all until they’d shot past leaving us to contemplate whether we still had time to change our minds.
2 comments
Ah, that was exactly how we felt when se reached Blaton. But we were also happy to be mixing it with the big boys again, although I think they put on quite a reception for you! Where are you headed next?
we reached, not se...sorry. Enthusiasm overwhelms my fingers at times as well as my feelings :)
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