On Monday morning we were invited over for coffee with Nelka and Jan who lived on a tugboat in another lake. The tugboat was 19m long but for all its size it was all grunt and deck with very little living space.
After coffee we headed up the Maas which has changed character and was now gentle flowing with meadows on both sides. Cows and Sheep drank from the clear waters. Our guidebook had said it was a quiet river but it turned out to be very busy with a constant flow of barges and pleasure boats returning from France.
We moored over the next few days in quiet lakes just off the main river or in busy towns and eventually on Wednesday afternoon arrived at our winter port of Roermond. Petra left us here and we worked on the boat changing the oil and tidying up. Next morning we were lifted out by a crane and put on to the hard ground.
We spent the afternoon trying to put on our plastic tarpaulins we had bought in Germany. But they proved very difficult to handle in the moderate wind. We also found out that we couldn’t leave any bottles of wine or water on board as the temperature can sink to –20C and cause them to explode. As we had quite a bit of both we called up Petra who very kindly came to fetch us and our wine/water/beer and we spent the night in Montfoort.
Next day we left to go to Schiphol to pick up our Renault car we had bought on a short term lease. It looks like a rental but you in fact own the car and they buy it back after you have finished but you don’t need to pay the capital value of it. With the help of our trusty Garmin GPS we headed back to Roermond to finish off the tarpaulin only to be told that the way we were doing it was no good as water could lie in a big puddle in the middle of the tarpaulin and cause the boat to fall off the boat stand.
So in the end we had to settle for covering just 2/3 of the boat but doing that took the rest of the day so we slept on board that night and left the next morning.
In the space of a few hours we had gone from Holland to Belgium to Luxembourg and then France as we headed down the motorways at 130km/h.
Eventually we stopped in Burgundy at a lovely village of Meursault which makes one of the top Burgundy white wines. The Hotel Les Arts offered a small room for 48 Euros and an excellent fixed price menu for around 20 euros. We had breakfast in the vineyards with a baguette we got from the baker and jam we bought from Holland.
Today we arrived in Vaison La Romain in the heart of Provence. After trying a few hotels we eventually found one on the edges of town. We had driven a lot of km to get here but now we can relax in the sun.
This week we cruise through Provence and then into Italy and down to the Sorrento peninsular where we have a villa for a week in a seaside town called Praiano. Ciao.
