 |
|
WaterNote 1
13 April, 2006 It is becoming time to leave Paris. It is springtime, after all. There are blossoms and buds all around us, and the Arsenal gardeners have started planting annuals in earnest. I was actually stalling because the city is so, um, sticky. It's hard to leave because of everything you'll miss. You have to pull yourself away and even so, there's a rubber band between you and it that pulls you back more strongly the farther you go....
We have a rendez-vous mid April in Antwerp to have the barge's hydraulics worked on, but we had been held back by the high and fast waters of the Seine (and my stalling). However, the river authorities opened a floodgate somewhere downstream the other day. The river went down about 15 centimeters and is now running less scarily. So now of course we could leave, but tomorrow is Good Friday. Easter Sunday is a holiday, and in France, so is Easter Monday. Therefore we are now planning to leave on Tuesday - going west on the Seine to Conflans-Ste-Honorine, the commercial barge center of France. From there we will head up the Oise toward Belgium. Our transport is a 1917 Skutsje tjalk, a wooden-shoe shaped Dutch Barge of about 18 meters. Its name is "Onrust" which means "restlessness" in Dutch. The name has nothing to do with the red stuff which accumulates on an iron boat. Luckily Oh, it was beautiful with that new paint job. Aha, it's a good time to sell the barge, we thought, now that it was so beautiful. And almost everything aboard worked. (!) So in fact, Onrust is for sale, but that doesn't seem to modify our lifestyle any. If any prospective buyers come along, they can email us and we will pull over wherever we are to welcome them. The paint job is now close to two years old, and no longer shiny new. I guess we'll settle back in to our happy wandering with Onrust. We'll be back in Paris as soon as we've had our Summer fling. Martha, the Skipper, and Louie the Cat 
|
it only accumulates above the water level. You don't usually sink from having rust. In fact we are relatively rust-free, as we had the boat stripped and painted year before last. 
