We left the little guest harbour in Assen at 8 sharp as it was literally a few metres from the first bridge, which was supposed to start operating at 8. Indeed, about 5 minutes later, the bridge keeper arrived and we were on our way. Unfortunately, the weather was quite a bit worse than the last few days and there were occasional rain showers and quite a bit of wind. The 'Drentse Hoofdvaart' is not bad, but it has a busy road running along it. On the other hand, the (many) bridges operate very smoothly and the people operating them are very friendly. There are also quite a few locks (a total of 7 today) and we were by ourselves in every one of them.
By half past three, we got to the Paradise Lock. Now we were here last year as well, and made a note on the chart which suggested it would be a nice place to stop. We even had a picture of it:
But the reality today was different: the noise from the road was more than we remembered and the mooring places were occupied by a few old, rusty unoccupied boats (we have seen this a few times in the Netherlands now: free mooring places, intended for tourists, being used to long-term store old barrels). So as it was not all that late, we decided to move on to Meppel. Now Meppel is about to close down for winter (from tomorrow, 1 September, the lock into the town only operates on weekdays and then only 3* 1 hour slots a day), but it's a very nice town so we took the same place underneath the windmill as we had last year:
This, by the way, is last year's photo!
We'll stay here until Monday, so there might not be a blog post tomorrow.
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