No matter what the weather; cold, wet, perfect, hot, miserable, happy, we’ve learned that by rolling one’s eyes just so, and reciting the phrase - “Summer in Belgium, eh?” a conversation will ensue.
Today that phrase would describe a listless, thirty-six degree day of the sort that saps the energy out of every living thing.
We had a bit of a complicated journey to make, down two rivers and up one, necessitating crossing the confluences at exactly the right time to avoid the worst of the tidal race from Antwerp.
Thanks in no small way to Patrick’s expert tutelage, we’d calculated that we’d need to depart at exactly three in the afternoon to enable us to ride the tide both down and up the rivers concerned, and at exactly that time as we set off, the dock was lined with well-wishers each extracting promises of our return.
Naturally we were travelling in the hottest part of the day, so it wasn’t just our unearned popularity that was making us uncomfortable. Through some sort of scientific miracle, no matter which direction the curves and bends in the rivers took us, we were looking directly in to the sun for the entire journey.
No one could describe conditions aboard as pleasant for those few hours, but they weren’t unpleasant either, as the newly monochromatic landscape swept by, the colour bleached out of everything, the water and the air so slick and heavy that it was like travelling through a paragraph from the ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’.
The tide calculation magic worked precisely as it should and barely four and a half hours after we set out, we were safely secured and waiting for the cool of the evening not to arrive.
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