Inland waterways

It was only 6 weeks ago that we were on the Rhone heading for the Mediterranean Sea but it feels like another life. Carl & Pia sent us a very nice little movie of us leaving Avignon. It’s nice to look back every now and then! Thanks Carl & Pia, we hope to meet you […]

We’ve been in the mediterranean for 3 weeks now and finally found the time (and stable WiFi) to piece a little movie together of the inland waterways. We have to admit that we do miss the French rivers and little canals a little bit every now and then. It was a special experience!

The mighty Rhône was the last stretch of inland water of our journey down to the Mediterranean. The amount of water that flows through this river is truly impressive. At some point while doing 5.5 kts through the water our speed over ground was 9 kts (16.2 km/h). The locks on the Rhône operate from […]

We stayed on the Saône from Corre to Lyon. Between Corre and Saint-Jean-de-Losne most of the locks are automatic and are activated with a pole. They operate from 9:00 to 12:30 and 13:30 to 19:00 (we’re in France after all) so we were often obliged to have a “long” lunch break. The first section of the Saône […]

After going through more than 200 locks in three different countries so far, and the large majority of them being in France (we still have to see what the locks on the Rhône look like), we felt the automatized locks on the canal de la Meuse and canal des Vosges deserved their own post. Let’s start […]

The canal de la Meuse joins with the Marne-Rhine canal in Troussey. We stayed on the Marne-Rhine canal until Toul. It’s a very short part but with many locks over a short distance (chaîne d’écluses) it takes time. We covered Sampigny – Toul in a day (that’s 18 locks) and stayed in Toul for the night. We […]

The Meuse canal in France stretches from Givet close to the border with Belgium to Troussey where it joins with the Marne-Rhine canal. The locks on this canal are mostly automatic but operate between 9 am and 6  pm only, so we have to plan our daily route accordingly. We spent the first night in […]

Departing from Maastricht we passed Liège (Luik) and spent our first night in Belgium in a marina not very far from Huy. The next day we passed Namur and after an unsuccessful attempt to fuel up and almost running aground in the marina (nice when submerged rocks right in front of a fuel station are […]

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Ours happened a bit later than we initially wanted to, in the afternoon of the 1st of May, 2017 in Leiden. For our first night we moored at the outskirts of Gouda. Going south we stopped at the Biesbosch Marina, the tiny but cute marina […]