Legends from our own lunchtimes

Saturday, July 06, 2024

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.

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