IT'S SUNDAY AGAIN - SATURDAY 27TH JULY - GEEL TO HERENTALS

We’d heard that little harbour in Herentals had fallen into disrepair, and the had become a hangout for a certain kind of person involved in anti-social if not illicit activity, the kind some would describe as “undesirables”.   We’d also heard that new management had done wondrous things to the harbour and its surrounds.

Since it is barely an hour’s from Geel, even with the late weekend opening of the locks, we were there well before lunch and received a very warm welcome from Dirk, the harbour master and for want of a better word lessee, whose enthusiasm for the port and boats in general was palpable.

In just a few short months under his guidance, the port has been transformed, “orphaned” and abandoned boats already on their way to China to be turned into cars and refrigerators,  the disruptive element moved on, and everything cleaned and weeded to within an inch of its life.  

Located barely two kilometres from the village centre, it’s just far enough away from things to feel that it’s “in the Pampas” as Jürgen would say, the perfect place to spend a relaxing Sunday evening, even if it was Saturday, watching the wind turbines gently doing their thing, and the Carp fishermen sending their drones aloft to spot likely game, follwoed by their robot boats dropping their burley and lines precisely above the fish.

We did take a small excursion into the centre of town, but it was pretty much in the very late stages of preparation for the grand finale concert of it’s annual three day Festival, loosely based on cycling events and other outdoor activities.  What a concert that turned out to be too. 

On this, the first day of the Olympics competition, hometown hero Wout van Aert had won a medal in the Individual Time Trial (Cycling) and it was as though the town had expected nothing less!

We didn’t stay, preferring to listen to the music from the (relative) tranquility of two kilometres distance.  It seems there’s a different rhythm to life itself at Festival time as not everyone in other places in the world would would accept that being able to hear actual lyrics in a song performed two kilometres away is a good thing.

Let alone at three in the morning!

A LITTLE CONFUSION - FRIDAY 26TH JULY - MOL TO GEEL

It’s hard to escape the feeling that “every day is a Sunday” at the moment, it was certainly quiet enough all day to convince us that our wall clock was wrong.     

Now that we are back to a more normal few hours travel per day it does tend to make us think we are a little crazy when it feels like Sunday and it’s only Friday.

Have we lost a few days or gained a week?  We can say for certain that almost every date on the last week of posts was seemingly at random (since corrected), quite possibly a reflection of our state of mind at present.

We don’t really care, but if we did find ourselves in a bit of a spin we’re in exactly the right place, because the city of Geel is noted for its foster care system for people dealing with mental health issues. Foster families sometimes host their boarders for decades, making them an integral part of the nuclear family. 

The families see the care they provide as normal, because many have learned it from their parents, grandparents, and extended family. It’s not some new fangled hippy ideal either, it’s just how Geel has worked for a very long time, since the thirteenth century in fact.

It’s a quite extraordinary thing, and although there’s a visitors centre at the hospital and of course a little more information in the church of Saint Dymphna who started the whole movement, everyone had gone home by the time we arrived to discover more, so we returned to the boat none the worse (although with just a touch of guilt) for having not consumed any more historical data.  

There, wewatched the sun slowly sink in the west, and wondered if tomorrow would feel like Sunday too.

TOO MUCH HELTERING TOO MUCH SKELTERING - THURSDAY 25TH JULY - MOL

We might have left this morning, in fact we intended too, but somewhere along the line we just sort of forgot.

It wasn’t really a conscious decision, more a result of a complete lack of enthusiasm for doing anything but sitting right where we are.  Perhaps yesterday afternoon had been too much of a good thing, or perhaps it had been just enough.

Whatever the case, we hung around, lunched ashore, measured things that needed measuring, cleaned things that probably didn’t need cleaning, and read and napped and generally had the sort of day one needs after a week of helter skelter.

About to board after one of our dalliances ashore our little dwarf Joyeux seemed to have enjoyed the day too, not that he ever does not.   A gift from Cindy and Joel when we first named the boat “Joyeux”, or “Happy” after the dwarf of the same name, he has stood watchfully by that window mostly unnoticed, fading slowly and gracefully with the years.    

Sometimes we wonder what he sees during our absences, does he become just a little Grumpy or Sleepy, or is he really just a lump of painted plaster?

Should we add him to the list of things to be maintained we wonder.  

We think not, by the time he fades sufficiently to match the curtains, we may well have taken on that kind of colour ourselves.

A BRAND NEW DAY - THURSDAY 24TH JULY - BOCHOLT TO MOL

We had almost convinced ourselves that we had no regrets about  not being in Maastricht, and perhaps eager to erase the memory of yesterday’s rush, we left early enough so that we could stop at a quiet mooring in the middle of nowhere to eat an equally quiet breakfast and think about where we might end up for the day, although it was almost morning tea time when we did.

We found a place on our charts that looked as though it might just be the tonic for whatever malaise had befallen us yesterday; a marina with a resort, in the middle of a lake, in the middle of nowhere and barely an hour away.   

It’s still a novelty to us in a country which is quite heavily populated, to discover places that are apparently so remote that they are a destination in their own right, yet, surrounded by people sunning themselves on their boats in the middle of a large lake we could be anywhere in the world.

There’s something about being among so many boats and boaty folk that makes fiddling with things less of a chore, so after a polite time of lying around, the proper solar controller we bought in Bremen was installed and demonstrating why it was worth seventy Euro more than the el-cheapo one we’d installed temporarily six or so years ago.

At this rate we’ll have working navigation lights by the end of the year too.

HALF WAY THERE - WEDNESDAY 23RD JULY - MAASTRICHT TO BOCHOLT

Wind, rain, clouds, partially sunny. with a late storm

In a decision that we would later slightly regret we decided that we could always return in a more relaxed frame of mind and visit Maastricht properly in the future.  If we were going to be sitting in the relative warmth and dry of the boat anyway we may as well be moving. 

A few kilometres into our journey, the sky magically cleared and we felt on top of the world. 

A few kilometres later we passed what might have been an interesting place to visit, but with the bit firmly in our teeth, rolled past confident that there would be many more just like it.

That, in the words of the song, was our mistake.   Tens of kilometres rolled past as the wind increased and sky darkened and the conditions generally deteriorated without a sign of anywhere to stop, nor anywhere to explore.   

When a likely place did turn up it was as usual an awkward mooring, timed perfectly to match the most vicious squall of the day, but after finally securing ourselves, took a deep breath, and wondered why we had left in the first place.

Then as the evening storms rolled in, an explanation for the flatness of our mood suddenly dawned;  We are on our way home.   

Even though we are only half way through our time on the boat, we have a deadline and deadlines change everything.  There are some obstacles to clear on our route so we need some time in reserve lest we are forced to go round them, but for now have to work hard not to be in a rush.

GOT HIS MEASURE - MONDAY 22ND JULY - BREMEN TO MAASTRICHT

We’ve tried to find a way of making toilets fit before.  in cost-benefit terms, the savings of finding something that fits exactly would more than make up for the drive.

As it turned out, with our diversions on the way, getting to the shop was a bonus, which was just as well because after careful measurement and dissection of the seven different varieties on offer (just fifty fewer than Heinz offer) every one of them was exactly wrong.

It’s a big store, and a huge mail order business, with lots of specialists to help so we enlisted the expertise of an affable young man whose usefulness was sadly akin to that of a chocolate teapot.  He was able to demonstrate the latest in silent electric technology, a macerating device that let out a groan of displeasure not unlike that one would expect of a human being pressed into similar service.   The thought of the expressions on suddenly wide awake and terrified guests after a midnight flush was certainly enough to convince us that an electric conversion, no matter how convenient, is no longer part of this discussion.

We thanked him, and set about remeasuring everything in the vain hope that something had changed during our discussion.

Perhaps more toilet confused than before, we were able to pick up a satisfying collection of other “need-to-measure” parts, and made a list to arrange for delivery of others before once more heading towards the southern horizon.

New fangled silent technology may not be so brilliant in mechanical toilets but it really comes into its own on Autobahns, with adaptive cruise control providing just the right number of additional eyes while one pair scans the rear view mirror for Porsches and white vans approaching at two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.   Almost five hours later, we had returned the car, mission nowhere near accomplished, tired but happy, still basking in the joy of the past few days.

Well one of us was tired but happy, the other, having slept very soundly till at least lunch time, was just happy!

BLIND DATE - SUNDAY 21ST JULY - WUPPERTAL TO OLDENBURG

Anyone with a basic knowledge of German geography, (or an Atlas) might have worked out by now that Wuppertal is not exactly close to Bremen in the far north of Germany, so when the new day arrived we were still several hours of Autobahn away from our destination and a day too early for the shops to open.

However, one of us has been quite heavily involved in recent weeks in the collaborative development of a new CNC machine.   It’s in the prototyping stage presently, with  half a dozen or so people putting in their tuppence worth and there's one (test) machine completed in the USA, and another in Oldenburg, Germany ready to make its first cut.          

“Now there’s a happy surprise - Oldenburg is only forty minutes from the marine toilet shop in Bremen!”

The world of internet communities is a strange and wonderful place, where faceless people appear to hide between pseudonyms, but spend so much time together over the course of any given project that they end up knowing each other almost intimately.   So it was, when bitingmidge met Tokoloshe face to face, after three or four years of collaboration that it was more of a reunion than a first meeting.

We spent hours with Phillipp and Andrea and their happy brood, drinking cups of tea, swapping stories and generally catching up on each other’s lives while poring over the finer details of the new machine and the software, putting it through it’s preliminary paces.  All the while four pairs of tiny feet attached to bodies banging and cutting things for their own projects in the background, never crossing the invisible line that brought them within the “danger zone”.

Eventually, the call of the “new toilet” tugged us away, and we left laden with gifts of precious things; some seashells collected on a holiday, a commemorative plaque made on the new machine, and a deadly shank with a pink handle lovingly crafted in our presence, which would come in handy if we encountered any dragons on our way.