Photoblog

for a sailor men: since May I landed in a city called Aachen and it is located next to Belgium and Netherlands. Well I like particularly girls that speak German with a French accent, so Belgium is not to bad…but! there is no water here. Non! Not even the smallest puddle that would allow to sail a dinghy with a towel. Frustrating? Ohh yes, indeed!

So what drives me to write just a few sentence with no pictures?

Well I went to Cologne to grill some German sausages with some friends (we had a very nice salad to, thanks to K.). In fact we have been on a grassland close to the river Rhein. Water! And can you imagine I saw boats again…jet-skies and motor boats, but not even a single sailing boat. Not a single crazy German like me that is using his towel in a little dinghy to sail up the Rhein with wind from astern (which in fact is forbidden in Germany, maybe because only Germans are crazy would due crazy stuff like that?).

You cannot imagine how much I miss it to have the Atlantic not anymore a ten minutes walk away from home. Even not the 1,5m on 0,9m Portuguese flag in my bedroom is helping to overcome the home sickness for Portugal. Hopefully I have a rendezvous in august with Portugal an all the nice and friendly people I met there.

Well after all this day (besides I was not in Portugal) was really a very nice and relaxing day. And not a single picture, shame on me!

Usually we do not realize anymore so much what is usually for us and we forget to see the paradise just at the wayside:

For trips with a sailing boat on the river Douro it is usually necessary to take off the mast. Or you just have a small boat. Since there was a very good possibility to get one of those small boats a relocation had to be done. After waiting some time until an axle for the trailer was found it was possible to pick up the boat.
In Germany it is allowed to have a trailer without brakes up to max. 750kg. Well I guess we slightly exceed this weight. Therefore I was driving quite carefully and not faster then 60km/h on the highway. No pictures while driving, but right before and after. The boat will get a new paint and the interior will be rebuild. This will be done hopefully quite soon and then the Douro suited sailing boat is available.

Quite a stormy day:

Since inside it was much more comfortable we had a nice lunch and enjoyed the view out of the windows: