It's a Cat's Life

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It’s all in the translation…which may mean it is lost….and when in doubt Google. We ended the last blog on the optimistic note that some poor people had to go back to school and work this week – that of course was ridiculous. How can children exist without 6 weeks off in the summer? There we were in a new harbour when we are introduced to Mickey, a ginger and white cat who lives on a tiny ie about 16ft long boat, Slobby, with his 2 owners on their 3 week annual holiday. He normally lives in an apartment in Friesland so seems to quite enjoy the freedom a lead gives him when boating. The guy mentioned that he had to go back to work this week and we said knowledgeably, oh yes Friesland have had your turn and he quickly put us right – the locals here have another 3 weeks to go and another region will have broken up so there will probably be more rather than less people in the area. We go to Google for the definitive answer having been told on at least 3 occasions that the whole of Holland summer holidays are staggered – they are but only by a week each!! This completely vindicated our decision the previous evening.

We had moored up in the passant haven ie in the “town” (ie one street with 3 shops on it) but been completely unable to move it was so hot and so we had spent a whole day watching the antics of what felt like thousands of holiday makers doing what holiday makers do. We were actually in the middle of a national park and should have made ourselves look for an attractive, quiet mooring but we didn’t. Instead we decided enough was enough. The next day we would seek quieter pastures. Before we did this however we did get the dinghy out and saw half of the national park that way. It was lovely but we decided we liked Ossenzil better and so got going and ended up travelling for about an hour, a convoluted route round Akkrum with various bridges to negotiate, when we realised we were the only people on this vast river. We travelled for 3 hours to where Mickey was and saw about 4 other boats. We were probably only about 10 miles away as the crow flies!!

However we have more friends arriving on Tuesday and we are going to pick them up in Sneek, back in the heart of the most popular area and so we need to make our way back North. It rained all the next day contrary to the BBC forecast, we travelled for 4 hours, did 23 miles and ended up at Joure (pronounce Yow-ra) which by road is about 2 miles away from Mickey! You can discern from this that we are boating in watery circles but always on new waterways.

Joure was said to be immensely popular and it certainly was crowded and we needed the HM help to get us in. Joure is famous for being the birthplace in 1793 of Egbert Douwe whose father set up the coffee company Douwe Egbert – not quite sure why the name got reversed. So of course we had to go to the little museum but only for 30 minutes because we were rather late. But we were warmly welcomed and given two packets of fruit teas! In fact in Joure the coffee factory is still working and had branched out to include not only teas but also tobacco and there is also a very large Imperial Tobacco factory block next to the harbour. The overall smell of Friesland which is sometimes heavily perfumed by the black and white Friesland cows, in Joure is overtaken by coffee and tobacco. Popular the harbour may be but we didn’t think we would return as we made our way back to Sneek in the glorious sunny but rather windy weather.

On the way one source of entertainment was getting a bridge to raise, in the process stopping the A6, a 4 lane dual carriageway, which in turn caused a half mile tail back in both directions!! We were later to drive over this bridge three times but fortunately with no pesky boats to hold us up. Our challenge is to take our friends to interesting places which are not absolutely full of people –this is not a point about capacity, we are still finding places to moor – so we may head back to the coast. There are lots of options.

A couple of little things which may interest someone……when we were here before there were few pump outs and very little pressure on people to so do. Now there are many more – at least in Friesland where they have put in 100 pump outs recently and there is significant publicity about what all these children are swimming in. We have even found a free one. And with this hot weather we have been thinking about how to keep windows open but flies and mossies out – and have bought a wonderful gadget which is a mossie net which fits over a hatch and has a thingy to fix it to the window independent of how wide open it is – wish we had bought 2 more. If anyone wants the details let us know.



We go home on Saturday but have more travelling and entertaining to do before then. We reckon we have travelled about 600 miles since we came out here in May which is about 100 a week, ie a trip to Oxford and back each week – feels a bit different!!

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