SOME DAYS ARE GOLDEN - FRIDAY 5TH JULY - OUDENARDE TO TOURNAI

We tried not to be too ambitious today with a weather forecast for unpleasant conditions tending towards horrible in spots, but as things always do, they turned out well enough with just the right amount of inclement to give the windscreen wipers a nice test to boot.

Wind can be a bit of a problem for us and it did blow quite hard from time to time, but due to some sort of inverse law of nature to the one that usually applies when we are on the boat, it dropped out just enough to make manoeuvring possible each time we needed to enter a lock or avoid an obstacle or a three thousand tonne ship.

At times, with wind and current against us, despite Mr Perkins’ valiant efforts to push us along, making headway was a bit of a struggle, but struggle he did although there’s been a return of his incontinence and we are seriously beginning to wonder if after four and a half decades, the pumps he drives are beginning to feel their age too.

Tomorrow, the forecast is “worse than today”, which makes us think we might plan to do not much at all.

Will we get out and explore Tournai?  

That’s a question for tomorrow.

SAME WINDSCREEN, DIFFERENT DAY - THURSDAY 4TH JULY - BEERNEM TO OUDENARDE

On a long day, one has nothing much to do other than concentrating on avoiding the hard bits at the edges of the water, staying as far away as possible (see the first “other than”) from the monster ships plying the narrowish waterways at speeds we can only dream of and generally moving about every now and then to keep a bit of circulation happening.

Between those various occupations is a significant time for thinking.

Recently, in Denmark, we visited the Viking Ship museum, where somewhat puzzlingly we discovered that one of the load carrying ships was capable of transporting the weight of one and a half female Indian elephants.   

Meanwhile somewhere in North America about the same time, a sink-hole had appeared in a “sidewalk” the size of seven refrigerators.  

Perhaps it’s got something to do with wind turbines breaking up the 5G wavelength but it’s clear that more tried and trusted means of measurement, (think cubic metres or kilograms) are no longer adequate, but none the less it occurred to me that the largest of the ships passing us every half hour or so, was capable of carrying around 30,000 refrigerators, or indeed 750 female Indian elephants. 

This led me to be quite grateful that we weren’t travelling with a flotilla of Viking ships, because the queue to each commercial lock would be the 750 elephants divided by one and a half, or precisely 625 Viking ships long.

Yes, it had been a long day, and yes it was a bit tiring, but it could have been worse.  Had we been travelling at the speed of light, in the same nine hours we could have travelled around the sun sixty-five times rather than just seventy or so kilometres to Oudenarde.

WE CAN SEE! - WED 3RD JULY - BEERNEM

 

Rain is not our preferred weather when moving on.   

We have to put up with it of course from time to time, but with the forecast looking quite miserable today we abandoned our admittedly hastily drawn plan to leave this morning, and replaced it with “let’s fix the windscreen wipers”, a job that’s been on our list for quite some time.

Fortunately I’d bought a new blade and arm a couple of years ago and they’d been rolling around underfoot in my little helm station to remind me they needed installing “when I had ten minutes to spare’.  

This lack of activity has meant that things have been a bit awkward on board from time to time while moving in the rain, as one of us has had to don her wet weather gear, duck outside with a squeegee in hand while the other had to multi task, contemporaneously steering and pointing to bits she had missed all the while ensuring his coffee didn’t spill.  She swears she didn’t mind, but even someone with fewer than fifty years of bliss under their belt would be aware that there was probably an end date to that arrangement.

A “ten minute job” on a boat of the age and heritage of ours never takes ten minutes, so it was not unexpected that the boat interior resembled a car boot sale by the time we’d finished.

However, with new electrical connections at both ends, a note to replace the switch at some time in the future, and a new wiper blade and arm assembled from components of various bits and bobs that “might come in handy” it is with some relief and a good deal of satisfaction that we can say we have a reliable wiper for the first time in a very long time.

Tomorrow, we will be on our way, rain, hail or shine!

SLUIS - TUESDAY 2ND JULY - SLUIS

Despite the impression we might accidentally give from time to time, our cruising life is not just about lolling about and eating chocolate.

There are waffles as well.

And there’s walking, quite a lot of walking.  Walking to get groceries, walking to take the rubbish to the bin, walking to see things.  There’s no escaping it, even on those rare days when we don’t leave the boat, we can do many thousands of steps (but who’s counting?) and the boat is only ten metres long overall, barely seven inside.  

Therefore when Dave and Ria suggested we might like to go for a little drive this afternoon we leaped at the chance to walk the kilometre or so to their garage, buckled in and headed for the Netherlands.  It’s easy to remain quite nonchalant at the prospect of trans border travel, when one realises the distance to the border is barely as far as it is to the hardware store and back, but the village of Sluis is at least twenty kilometres away.  

It’s a pretty, quasi touristic shopping centre that seems to exist almost solely for Belgians looking for bargains, and a range of local foodstuffs, or simply an afternoon out.

There is even a working windmill to pose for photographs.

Just to demonstrate that we don’t require a boat for lolling about there was coffee too.

And yes, (rolls eyes), poffertjes.

BLIKVANGER MONDAY 1ST JULY - BEERNEM

Just when I thought “winkelwagen” was my favourite bit of Flemish, perhaps beside “Waggelwaterbrug”, along comes “blikvanger” to challenge for the top spot.,  It turns out doesn’t really have a  translation in the context of this discussion, but we think we can pretty much work it out.   

Blikvangers (not their real name) are positioned along bicycle paths for the convenience of commuters.

Imagine riding your bike to the station, sucking on a can of your favourite fizzy pop, when along comes an opportunity for a spot of Blikvanging.  

Who could resist? 

There are no points awarded, but a successful ejection of the can is far better than turning up at the office with it stuffed down one’s shirt front.  There’d be the never ending quest to get it into the first hole I’m sure.   Failure no doubt means appearing on television, perhaps “Belgium’s Most Wanted” if that failure also involves failing to stop and trying again. 

As an aside, all over Europe public lawns and verges are being allowed to grow with the bare minimum of mowing to keep things a little tidy, which is why apart from a few mown pathways the park in the background looks a little overgrown.  

This is in the interests of promoting bio diversity, encouraging insects and birds back to places they may have left, and it can’t hurt the local authorities gardening budgets either, although shares in mower companies might not be such a great investment at the moment.

In some countries, most assuredly not here, where blikvanging is not yet a thing, one can only imagine the nasty surprises that await the mower operators in all that undergrowth when the annual mowing comes around. 

SANS PANORAMA SUNDAY 30TH JUNE - BRUGES

Just one of the things that draws us back to this place is the continually changing view.   

It’s like a life size “Where’s Wally” model, the more you look, the more there is to see.  If sweeping panoramas are your thing, it’s safe to say that Brugge is not for you, at least from that perspective, but if you like a nice vista, you may never leave.

This is why it takes us so long to go anywhere.  Everywhere we look there’s something to discover, whether it be a neat little decoration in a window, an intricately carved cornice, or a car appearing to be miraculously floating above diners in the cafe at the end of the street. 

There’s simply no escape from it, which I suppose is why we gave the mobile food truck our award for “most appropriate pun of the day”

Who could resist buying a cardboard box of spaghetti from “Pasta la Vista”?