I love boats and the water.
All of my life I have been on the water. When I was little, my family
would travel to Northern Michigan to go camping and fishing. One year we visited a neighbor from home, who
had a cabin on the Thunder Bay River, and we floated down the river in a
canoe. That was an amazing experience
for me. You see this was in the 60’s and what you watched on black and white TV
was Cowboys and Indians, and Indians used canoes. Eventually my father found a
deal on a used Boy Scout canoe. It was
an old aluminum canoe and I learned to do all the paddle strokes so that I
could make it move however I wanted in our pond. After three years of marriage, living in Michigan,
Elizabeth and I moved to Tennessee and within a year the canoe moved too. Unfortunately it sank when a friend borrowed
it. It had rained a lot, and the water was too high. (That story may become a
facebook series.) A friend who was a SCUBA diver rescued it. It was never the same again; the rivet holes
were now oblong instead of round. So we
sold it cheap and bought other canoes and kayaks of various types over the
years.
Fast forward to Belgium: as soon as it was a possibility to move,
I started researching rivers and found that the kayaking rivers were in the
South Central area of the country by a city named Dinant. They have three companies, Blue, Red and
Yellow (catchy names, eh?) The next problem for me was how to get there. I haven’t had any luck meeting someone from
here who likes to do that. I could rent
a car - 100 euro for same day rentals plus 40 euro for fuel about 200 miles
round trip. TOO Much!! Then this year I found that you could go by
train as a combination with the kayak companies for about 4 euro more than the kayaking
itself. We asked a friend from Africa,
who we met at our English classes, if he would like to come with some of his
friends from the Military Academy. There
were going to be six of us. He went on a
trip to a camp in the south of France and while he was gone we kept reading and
translating, and we realized that you have to purchase the tickets four
business days in advance. That wasn’t
going to work unless I paid for everyone, because our friend was still away at
camp up until two days before we planned to go kayaking. That seemed kind of risky as someone might
back out. So we then found out that there was a summer excursion fare for 15
euro round-trip anywhere in Belgium on weekdays, so that was the Answer. Elizabeth called the kayak company and they
said you don’t need reservations on weekdays. I sent emails to my friend but he
was occupied until Monday the day before the trip. We met up and discussed the details over
lunch. It was raining hard, so we had to find
somewhere close. Two of the friends could not go. So we went to the train station and bought
four tickets for the next day at 7:20 a.m.
The next morning was a typical Belgian morning - overcast but it was
supposed to get all the way up to 69 degrees Fahrenheit and be sunshiny.
We had a great train trip - nice conversation, beautiful
countryside. We rode beside a river for
much of the journey. After an hour and a
half we arrived at Anseremme, and when we walked up to the ticket window of the kayaking place we
were told that there had been too much rain and the river was closed to
kayaking!! We were so disappointed! It rains almost every day in Belgium in the summer!
The website didn’t say anything about that possibility and when Elizabeth called
they didn’t advise us of that possibility either. So we went back to the train station and
waited for the return train. We did have
a nice ride back though! And I still
have something to look forward to!
