Back 'home'

It's difficult for us to say what's 'home'. We love Cape Town and it's probably our first 'home'. And after a year in London, we were quite happy to call it 'home' too, we really love that city! But for us on 'Onbekommerd', the Netherlands is definitely 'home'. So although we really enjoyed Denmark and will go back there next year and are ok with Germany too, we were happy to cross the Dutch border just before midday today:





The day started when we entered the Haren - Rüttenbrock canal at 9:





It's a nice canal (apart from the busy road on the port side). You form a small convoy (in our case 3 boats) in the first lock and after that the further 2 locks and 10 bridges are ready for you. Well organised!

At the Dutch border, the convoy gets re-established (in our case after the 12 to 1 lunch break) and you move through a whole lot more bridges and locks, some of which are manually operated!





This plethora of locks and bridges, plus the maximum speed of 6 Km/hr in the canals makes for slow progress, which meant that we got as far as Musselkanaal, instead of Stadskanaal which is about 10 Km down the road.

But we are in a nice guest harbour here, close to our first Dutch supermarket where we immediately bought 'koffiemelk', 'stroopwafels', 'ontbijtkoek' and 'kano's', the latter being Lyn's latest crave!

On past Stadskanaal tomorrow. We have a vague plan and see where we'll end up.

Location:Havenkade,Musselkanaal,The Netherlands