Today is the first day I really feel like the journey has begun. Up until now everything has been getting the boat ready and even the first few day I worried about how we would handle the moorings and whether we can find what we need. Now I am beginning to feel that we can handle the boat and that everything is working fine. Plus the weather is good at last! Today I wore shorts and a tee shirt for the first time.
We had motored down from Sneek to Giethoorn via the Princess Margriet Canal alongside the large barges, and then down small canals, across a large, windy lake and through some more canals. The first night we moored beside the canal in a free mooring at the edge of a national park. It was very peaceful. Then next day we got to Giethoorn after lunch and moored in a Marina, hoping to get some washing done, but their machine was broken. We rode bike around the lovely little village with its picture perfect little houses along a tiny canal. Super cute.
A short trip the next day took us to Zwartesluis where we moored right in town and got some laundry done (more on laundry later), and this morning the curtain people arrived and installed the curtains in the Salon and Galley – now she is complete!
So today was warm and sunny, with a brisk wind on the open water. We motored from Zwartsluis down to the Issel (one on the major rivers of Holland draining the Rhine), out the Issel to its entrance in the Isselmeer and a short stretch to the inland channel around Flevoland. The short ¼ mile stretch had enough rolling to make one of us a little queasy. Then down the inland channel past marshes, and hundreds of Swans to Elburg, an old town that was once a major port on the sea and is now tucked away behind a province that had only existed since the 1930s. It is a neat little town encircled by a canal and the remains of the old wall.
So today was not about getting things done testing things out, organizing or shopping. It was about the journey. I look forward to many more.
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