Anseremme

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!