Transport with a difference

It's already nearly the end of September and this is only my second post this month. Mea culpa! Far from lacking the desire to write it, life has just had other priorities due to the fact it has been lovely weather for much of the month. With cooler nights and warm days (not always sunny, but very pleasant), the joy of being outside has been even greater when compared to August's crippling heat. As a result, that's where I've been as much of the time as possible.

In my last post, I wrote about how daughter #1 and I painted the hull of Vereeniging using our two rowing boats, Bluey and Little Grey. Since then, we've done other jobs on the barge, but I also had a lovely day with daughter #2 when she and her partner came down to go out for a bike ride with the dogs.

What prompted this initially was her acquisition of a dog trailer for her spaniel Mack, which meant she and Steven could go exploring by bike with Mack in the trailer. They've had some grand adventures and so much fun I was inspired to buy one for Zoe and see if we could do the same. After a search on our version of ebay, I found a suitable one for my little pooch, and the test run was promising. I can't say yet that she loves it, but she was good as gold when we tried it out and she definitely enjoyed the afternoon excursion we did with the family.

Ready for our test run. She was a very good girl.

So we decided on an excursion further afield than just around the village. Below are some photos of our 'grand day out' with Mo, Steven and Mack.

Mack is a bigger boy than Zoe so his carriage was
a couple of sizes larger

And here we are, out on an adventure. See Zoe's little face 
watching Mo out the back of her carriage.

Once we were off the main road, the pups had their freedom

That little face just slays me. :)

Since then, I've taken her over to Vereeniging in her trailer and I'll try and do more trips to get her used to it. Given that she's a lazy little tyke and finds street walks dull, I think it might come in very handy just to get her to the woods and the nature reserve where she enjoys running free. 

Anyway, after that adventure, it was back to work on the boats, but this time on our Hennie H whose roof badly needed attention. It took me four days to sand and paint it but I finally finished, barring the edges, which I'll have to do this week. She's not looking too bad for a shabby old lady, is she? I wish I could say the same for myself (says she studying her battered hands and fingernails).

The next job is going to be painting the hull, which also needs some TLC. For that, I needed our Little Grey which happened to be lying next to Vereeniging with Bluey in the historic harbour. The boats' two harbours are separated by around 750 metres of parkland and a huge road bridge. Of course, it would have been nice to row it around the island but the rules of the Gent-Terneuzen canal mean that rowing boats aren't permitted, so the only other way to move Little Grey was overland. 

Since he has rollers for that purpose, I decided to walk him from one harbour to the other and thanks to daughter #1, this proved to be as easily done as said. We received a few odd looks from passers by for using this novel method of transporting a boat but it really was fun in the sun.

#Daughter 1, Jodie, pulling Grey as well as leading her Lucy

And I did my bit too!

Little Grey is now 'parked' next to Hennie H ready for action, which I hope to be starting this week. Fingers crossed that the weather remains kind.

And now for a photo of my ridiculous dog for Rebecca Hislop. I honestly don't know what Zoe thinks she is sometimes but this position is quite a common one for her to adopt. She is definitely very sweet but also totally bonkers.

Have a lovely week allemaal and I'll try and catch up soon with the rest of the news from our corner of the flatlands.

 

Blacking with Bluey

It's two weeks since I last posted here and I'm not quite sure why I haven't. It's been busy, of course, but that's normal. The education year has started again and I've been making some extra efforts to find work, something which is in slightly short supply at the moment for me as a freelancer, so I've been writing emails and updating my CV and generally putting the word out for my availability. Doing all that has definitely taken up some time.

People often ask me when I intend to retire fully and the honest answer is that I don't know. For one thing, I enjoy what I do very much. I love the contact I have with students and researchers as I find it stimulating to learn about their studies, their subjects and their opinions. The discussions are lively and it does me good to be challenged by these younger, eager minds. I might not agree with them; I sometimes don't, but being part of the debate stops me from stagnating and vegetating. That has to be a plus, doesn't it?

The other aspect is financial. Without going into detail, I came to the Netherlands too late to receive a full pension and because of the time I've been away from the UK, I am not entitled to any money from when I worked there. As for South Africa, there was (maybe still is) no reciprocal pension arrangement with Europe, and anyway, I've been away from there too long as well. Had I been financially savvy, I'd have organised myself much earlier, but I wasn't, so I just have to live with the situation. Working fills the gap and so I'll carry on teaching as long as I keep on enjoying it. After that? Well, we'll see.

So what about writing more, you might ask. It's a good question. I love writing, but it's my hobby and I've never wanted to make it my job. Okay, I worked in marketing and communications for many years, but then I was writing to order for a company. I loved that too, but it's very different from writing books and trying to market them yourself. I've never wanted my books to be 'products' and I'm hopeless at self promotion, so that wouldn't work for me. Besides, to write professionally would mean spending hours at my computer and I'm far too fidgety for that. Everyone in my sphere knows I can't sit still for more than fifteen minutes. That aside, I have a barge (make that two) to look after, which brings me to the title of this blog...see, you knew I'd get there eventually, didn't you?

A few blogs ago, I mentioned that the weather had been very harsh on Vereeniging's hull this past year. She was out of the water for three weeks in 2025 and looked beautiful when we brought her back to the harbour at Sas van Gent. However, the hard winds, storms and extreme heat of this summer reduced the shiny top coat on the hull to a cracked and flaking mess. It was horribly disappointing.

So I had an idea that I cooked up with daughter #1. If we bought another little rowing boat, we could both repaint the hull down to the waterline within a day. Enter Blue (or Bluey as he is now called), the little boat I wrote about in my last post. A couple of days after Bluey's arrival, we descended on Vereeniging with a five-litre pot of hull paint, pulled both Bluey and Grey (the little boat we already had) into the water and took a side each. We had already scraped and sanded all the flaking paint off, so now it was a matter of very carefully rolling new hull paint on to avoid any drips into the water. 

I can report that Bluey is not quite as spotless as he was on arrival and Grey is also well spattered with black, but we did it and Vereeniging has a bit more protection now against the winter furies. She may not be shiny, but at least her hull is painted again. Daughter #1 and I, however, were splattered in black and exhausted at the end of the day. It took us both some time to recover. The muscles needed to keep the boats in place while painting in a harbour with busy water were worth a fortune in workouts.

As you can see, then, this is one reason why I could not sit and write fulltime for a living. The other reason is in the photos below. Well, not really, but Zoe needs walks despite her own conviction that she doesn't. A lazier and more reluctant dog I have yet to meet. She much prefers to snooze in this corner of the sofa. 😄

Tomorrow and every day that the weather allows and work permits this month, we'll be doing more paintwork on both Vereeniging and Hennie H, but for now, I'll wish you all a great week, allemaal and hope to have more updates on life here in the flatlands soon.