The greatest impressionist

It's close to the end of October now, and I'm still wallowing in recollections of our summer travels. In fact, they ended more than six weeks ago, but I'm not quite done with them yet, as you will see. Having written about the year's special places, people and peak experiences, this week I'm going to waffle on about the sights and sounds of our watery journey that made the greatest impression on me.

The title of this post does, of course, refer to nature. When we fare gently along Belgium's stately rivers and France's quiet waterways and canals, we are very open to the natural world around us. We have no wheelhouse to protect us from the elements, but at the same time, we are not shielded or distanced from them either. I love being out on deck, and even when Koos gives me the freedom to go inside out of the wind or rain, I never do – except to make our coffee and snacks. And so we can smell and feel so much, whether it is the ripe odours of manure wafting across our bows mingling with the scent of jasmine, or the bite and burn of wind and heat on our skin. And there are the glorious sights too.

It's almost a cliché to wax lyrical about reflections, I know, but I am time and again struck by the perfection of the mirrored view we see in the water. I regret, always, having to disturb it as we did when we broke up the lovely eye-shaped image made by this new bridge in Thuin when we passed under it.

Then, how magical is this row of trees reflected so perfectly in the calm waters of the Schelde on a cloudless September morning? No impressionist painter could give us greater, more vivid art than what we see every day on the water.

And there are the secret corners and hidden beauty of places boaters and tourists rarely stop. Below is the entrance to an old water mill and its surrounding buildings; a tiny self-contained hamlet of run-down cottages, barns and, central to the collection, the dilapidated but charming mill: its workings gone, its bridge broken but exuding a confidential peace that drew us in. The trees and undergrowth had encircled it, emphasising its magical secrecy. What we spend fortunes creating, nature does naturally, silently and with infinitely more grace.

Or the isolated locks we pass through but, with nowhere to stop, we can only look back in regret at the inviting scene. There are dozens of these, each with a lock house standing forlorn and empty; the sad victims of a bureacracy that won't allow the sale of houses without public road access. So, with no lock keepers to live in them, they are falling into disrepair. If only...

A lonely lock, its only visitor the VNF lock attendants who 
follow us to each lock and operate the gates for us: men in small
white vans who work on the waterways but don't live on them

And just off the waterways, there are other delights, especially for Koos. Train lines often run parallel to rivers and canals. In the photo above, Koos is in his personal heaven because not only does the railway run alongside the Sambre, but we found a wild mooring where, after a very short walk, we came to a level crossing. To cap the delight completely, a train obligingly came past just as we arrived at the track.

But back to our natural world again, another magical aspect of the waterways for me is the animal life. We occasionally see water rats or voles, but most of the animals we encounter either next to, or on the water, are cattle. I missed an opportunity to capture a couple of cows taking a cooling dip one day, but we saw many other beauteous beasts as we fared along.

Mostly, however, our wildlife is birdlife. This year, there were more herons than I have ever seen before – even after realising that some of them were the same birds, constantly taking off and flying ahead of us before landing on low lying branches and standing stock still (as they do) as if they'd been there for hours. When I realised, it made me laugh. I could even imagine they were deliberately teasing us. There were also more coots, those stroppy, feisty, territorial little birds that can terrorise geese and other waterfowl three times their size. I love them. One of my favourite pastimes is watching the banks and looking for the secret activities of the life amongst the reeds or beneath the spreading branches of the trees. There are nearly always coots busily bossing their families about in the shallows.

But while we're on the subject of nature's glories, I mustn't forget the skies. We had spectacular weather  while we were away and day after day of sizzling sunshine with barely a drop of rain. Nevertheless, the sky still put on a majestic show, time after time. Below are just some of the fabulous cloudscapes we were treated to.

But there were also hazy, streaky tranquil skies, which I loved as well. The one below was a special example. I took it on the day we left France, and it strikes me that it carries a hint of the melancholy I felt in its blue haze.

There were inevitably numerous other sights and sightings that left their imprint on my memory. I could never put them all in a blog, but my photos help to remind me and I can spend endless hours looking at them, picturing where we were, reliving the moment. Just one example is this snap I grabbed of a rowing boat with an upside down chair in it. We were on the Sambre where numerous fishermen take their ease and often fish from small boats, but clearly this one had a story behind it. Any ideas in the comments below, please :)

Or the station at Obourg, near which we'd tied up against an old quay wall and taken a walk just to see where it went. In a chance encounter, we met a local man who told us the station was home to a war memorial commemorating an unknown British soldier. The information board told us the hero had held off a German advance single-handedly by sniping at them from a rooftop, thereby allowing his fellow countrymen to escape. Sadly, he didn't make an escape himself and for me, seeing this tribute to an Englishman's courage in such an obscure and out of reach spot was a moving experience.

So that's it for my summer travel blogs. I hope you've enjoyed seeing where we went, who we met and what we enjoyed so much this last summer. It was a wonderful, if short, trip, and one I won't forget in a hurry. We achieved our dream to reach the aqueduct on the Canal de la Sambre à l'Oise, we spent time at our personal mecca, Tupigny, and we went through the historic boat lifts at La Louvière. That's a pretty good score of 'firsts' for a one-month trip away, isn't it?

Enjoy the coming week, allemaal, and I'll be back with more current doings next week.