Hamburg and Belgium day six CrosiEurope Cruise

Today was the first day of our cruise on Raymonde and the plan was for the passengers to travel to Bruges to visit a brewery while the boat travelled to Gavere empty. As we had done the brewery tour in the past we decided to stay on the boat

and cruise through town and meet them later at Gavere. It was an interesting journey with just us and Hans, the cruise director on deck chatting about the local area. Some things are green, you can hire an electrically powered raft with the whole roof made of solar panels. The other rafts can be hired as floating patios. We also saw this lovely little tug boat. 

The top deck was out of bounds as the handrails were off due to the low bridges, some of them raised slightly hydraulically. This was done remotely by the same chap who operated the lock remotely.  We did give him a wave on the CCTV.

The morning was still so some of the reflections were very good. Raymonde is the only cruise boat based in the area and until we reached the larger waterways the other side of town we didn’t see any other boats .

We were soon out of the town and crossing what is effectively a canal ring road,The Ringvaart, that allows the big commercials to bypass the town. Just after we had crossed onto the large waterways mixing with the bigger commercial boats these

ladies came by on their electric trike . The commercials don’t hang about, we were cruising along at our normal speed when this came by

It was quite busy and as all the ships have AIS(automatic identification system) they know who is ahead, so how busy a lock will be and who is coming towards them. This boat had to wait to overtake as there was a pusher tug, a small boat pushing a motorless barge ahead of it coming towards us, it was still out of sight around the bend when he came up behind us and had to wait.

We arrived at Gavere about mid day, well before the others were back, which gave us time to go ashore for a quick look round. we were moored directly opposite what looked like an aggregate  works and just down the towpath from us was an overnight campervan stop with toilets etc. Probably one of the nicer ones we have seen but I think the stay was limited to three days.

When the others returned we had a late lunch, it was about 2-30 and we were on our way again. We were due to moor in Oudenaarde  but unfortunately there was no room for us so we had to carry on to Avelgem where we moored on the lock mooring overnight at the junction with the Kanaal Bossuit-Kortrijk. We weren’t the only ones as there was a big boy on the other side. Actually this was quite a good result as in the evening we visited the village church that is now just a ruin with just the walls and quite remarkably the end stained glass windows surviving