Week two of our long trip to the Western Isles, and the weather can best be described as mixed. We have had beautiful sunshine, torrential rain, strong winds and complete stillness. The only consistent thing has been the beauty we have seen.
We have had our son, Tin, and his girlfriend, Cheryl, with us this week. Last week we were joined by Mandy’s brother Stephen. Perhaps because we have had visitors we have made the effort to get out every day, and we have been well rewarded.
When the rain came in to replace sunshine we had the most stunning rainbows.
When we were stuck in the rain we discovered a roadside seafood shack, serving the best lobster, crab and prawn rolls.
When it has been dry but cloudy we have still found the beaches to be pristine white.
And when the sun has come out, our visitors have made the best of the invigorating cold waters.
We have met bears in the forest,
Peacocks by the cottage,
And wild Eriskay horses in the roads
We have seen sunrises, sunsets,
And wonderful night skies.
And we are just two weeks into our six week break.
I do think the Outer Hebrides are perhaps the most beautiful islands in the world.
There are a number of questions we get asked all the time by non-boaters. How often do you fill up with water? Where do you get your electricity? How does the Internet work on a boat? Is it very cold in he winter? Where does washing up water go? Do you need a licence to drive a narrowboat?
Another common question is whether you are allowed to cruise at night.
The answer is “no” if you are a hire boater because your insurance won’t cover it. But for liveaboards like ourselves the answer is “yes” because it has always been allowed. At the peak of canal traffic, in the 19th century, bargees were paid on taking a load from a to b, however long that took, and so often they would travel all day and all night.
Although it is allowed, these days we see almost no boats travelling at night – maybe two or three in a season. Certainly we have never travelled at night. Even with the headlight, you can’t see very well, and it is annoying to fellow boaters who may be sleeping.
But this time of year the sun sets so early that this week we found ourselves travelling in the dark at just after 4pm. Perhaps we should have moored up as soon as it got dusky, but there was a particular mooring we were heading to, and besides it was an adventure.
The water looked very beautiful as the sun went down and my eyes acclimatised quite well. Still, I decided to move even slower than usual because seeing obstructions in the canal was very difficult. Surprisingly, locks were less of a problem. The headlight is designed to illuminate tunnels, and a lock is like a tunnel without a roof, so they lit up quite well.
I don’t think we will choose to travel at night again in a hurry, but as Thomas Beecham once said, you should try everything in life once, except incest and Morris dancing. And I love an adventure.
Over half way through on my month long train jaunt around Europe to celebrate being old, and despite all the travelling I am full of energy. Week 1 was in the North, week 2 in the East and week 3 has been in the South. My last blog ended with me arriving in Palermo. The good news is that there was no horse’s head in my bed. Instead I found myself attending mass in the Catholic Cathedral. I do not understand Italian, but my Dad was a vicar and so I could follow the rhythms of the service and it was very peaceful. Mind you, I am not sure what this statue was indicating, outside the door.
Scicily is a slow paced island and I loved my time there. I even bought a cap, like the ones they wear in Godfather 2. It will come in useful next summer on the narrowboat, especially if I need to resolve any family arguments.
Naples was my next stop – two trains, an Italian haircut and a boat away. I have never been to Pompeii so that was my priority. It did not disappoint. The ruins cover a huge area with so many things to discover. And even better, because it was the first Sunday in the month, entrance was free. In my mind I was back in AD 79, under the shadow of Vesuvius.
One Pizza Cappricciosa and a good night’s sleep later and it was off to Genoa via Milan. It is a long journey and the train was delayed, so by the time I got to the hotel, it was nearly dark. I decided to take a walk around the harbour to the old town, and I was rewarded with wonderful old buildings and boats. It really is a beautiful historic town.
Tuesday’s trip was on small trains across the border from Naples to Nice. I was lucky because the Italian train strike did not affect my journey. I was even more lucky because the views from the train were spectacular, as the track clung to the cliffs on the edge of the Mediterranean. I have been on some of the world’s greatest train journeys, including the Glacier Express in Switzerland, and the highland line in Scotland. This route is up amongst the very best – Italian Riviera, Monaco and Cote D’Azur.
Nice is nice. I spent many hours wandering the streets and discovering old churches, art installations and gelaterias. I climbed the steep hill between the promenade and the port. It had the most stunning views. Another town I was sorry to leave.
There was one more town to visit this week and that was Marseille. It is a cosmopolitan city, founded 2600 years ago by the Greeks. The basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde sits on a big hill overlooking the town. This time I cheated and took the bus to the top. Again, incredible views and things to see before I walked down the cobbled streets to the port. I love walking when I am travelling because there are always surprises to find. I wandered into one abbey and found an organist practising. I just sat for a while and listened to the free concert. Then, when I got up to go, I discovered a door to the crypt, and found underneath the church a series of small chapels, hewn from the rock. I would never have found any of this had I not been wandering and wondering.
Having travelled through North, East and South Europe, it will not surprise you that I am going West for the last leg of my adventure. I had hoped to get to Spain and Portugal, but a combination of poor train options and bad weather has encouraged me to change my mind and head to the west of France. I’ll tell you more next week.
I feel that I have now got into the swing of this trip – a month travelling by train through Europe. I am already nearly halfway through and feeling a little tired but I am not complaining. What a whirl it has been. If the first week was a celebration of the north of Europe, this week has been concentrated in the east.
I finished last week in Prague and from there I travelled to the far eastern corner of Czechia in an old industrial town called Ostrava. The industry closed down soon after the fall of communism, but there are many remnants including a huge coal slag heap overlooking the town. It is now a nature reserve and very beautiful, but as I climbed to the top I could still smell burning coal, as some of the “slag” still cooks underground. Early the following morning I ventured out to walk around a massive old iron works. It was dramatic and somewhat spooky.
From Ostrava it is a hop and a skip over the Polish border to Krakow. I had not realised that this is the train line that took Jews to the death camp Auschwitz. I did consider going to see the camp myself, but could not get a ticket. Instead I went to Oskar Schindler’s factory and then to the Krakow concentration camp Plaszow. Until recently I would have just found woodland with one memorial but this year a great deal of work has been done at the site, with many explanatory plaques and pictures telling the story. The visitor centre is not yet complete and the extensive site is not advertised. As a result I was the only person there for much of my visit, which in some ways made it even more poignant.
I did also enjoy myself in Krakow. It is another beautiful east European city, with lovely churches and museums everywhere. I took a trip out to see the salt mine, where over 300 years miners have carved out underground chapels and statues. Stunning. Krakow is also so cheap. I got a huge Polish breakfast for about £5. I will definitely come back.
Krakow to Vienna was on a lovely new train with a panoramic coach borrowed from Swiss Railways. It gave me great views over the countryside as the sun went down.
Vienna is famously beautiful and another great city for walking. I went to see the Spanish Riding School training their horses (no photos of horses allowed) and took a tram out to the outskirts of the town just so that I could take it back in again past the most famous monuments. A lovely place but after Krakow boy is it expensive! My wallet was happy when I got on the night train to Rome.
This is one of the newest night trains – having been put into service a month ago. As well as sleeping compartments for 4 or 6 people, it has the innovation of sleeping pods, known as mini cabins. These are the price of a bed in a couchette but for individual travellers like me, offer privacy and all the mod cons, such as being able to choose whether I want the lighting red, blue, yellow or white.
Rome was busy but not quite as expensive as Vienna. Most of what I do in these towns is free – I walk around and see what I can see. In Rome I did splash out €20 to visit the museum of the ancient Roman Forum. It was a fascinating and huge museum, with few visitors but a great deal to see, imagining myself wandering through the buildings in my toga, two thousand years ago.
Finally this week I took another night train from Rome to Palermo. This is the only train left in Europe where the rolling stock is shunted onto a ferry during the journey. The ferry took us from mainland Italy to Sicily where it unloaded the train again and off we went. The line along the coast in Sicily is one of the most beautiful I have travelled, looking across the blue Mediterranean Sea.
And so, after about 40 hours travelling on just three trains, I have arrived in Palermo, for a couple of days off. It is warm here, and I feel like I am on an old fashioned holiday. But the trains back up the west coast of Italy to France are calling. See you next week!
I explained in last week’s blog that I will be spending a month travelling by train around Europe to celebrate my 60th year. This has been my first week, and what a week it has been.
Through England and France to Belgium, where I stayed the night in the Flemish town of Antwerp, and enjoyed the famous Belgian beers.
Up to Dordrecht (where we once lived), Rotterdam (where I once worked) and finally to Groningen in the northern Netherlands, where I stayed with Christel a friend of nearly 40 years and her partner Gert-Jan.
On through Germany to Denmark, to stay in Copenhagen. Oh my goodness what a beautiful and peaceful city. And so walkable. Loved it.
From Denmark I stayed in Scandinavia, travelling to Stockholm in Sweden. This is the furthest north I have been in my life, and I made it a few miles further by hopping on a local ferry to see the archipelago that Stockholm sits on. I was obviously missing my boat! I also went to see the Swedish parliament. So much politer than the British one.
My first night-train of the trip was from Stockholm to Berlin, taking 17 hours. I shared a cabin with a Frenchman called Pierre, from Marseilles. He was a lovely chap, but after 12 hours in a confined space I was quite glad when he got off at Hamburg!
I dashed around Berlin in a couple of hours because It was too expensive to stay overnight and I chose instead to visit Dresden. I was expecting a bleak grey concrete city, that had been destroyed by the British bombs in the Second World War and then rebuilt by the East Germans. Instead I was greeted by tremendous “old” buildings that have been restored with a great deal of care.
My last trip of the week was to Prague. The train journey from Dresden was perhaps the prettiest so far, through a dramatic valley by the river Kirnitzch. No wonder this area is sometimes called the Saxon Switzerland. I was last in Prague in 1980 under communism. The lovely architecture has not changed but there are now so very many tourists. Too many.
It has already been quite an adventure and I have hardly started. I’m a very lucky boy. I miss sharing the experience with Mandy, but if she was here we would be going at half the speed and staying in twice the price hotels. Next up for me is a coal mining town in East Czechia, Kracow in Poland and then on to Vienna. I’ll let you know how I get on.
This week we are back properly cruising the canals of the UK and have travelled down the beautiful Macclesfield Canal (the Macc) to rejoin the Trent and Mersey.
The Macc is quiet compared with the great canal & river thoroughfares such as the T&M, the Grand Union or the Thames. It has a reputation for being shallow, which is probably well deserved given closures in recent years, but this year we have had plenty of rain, and while some edges can be shallow, we did not find it too difficult to navigate. There is just one hire company and so most of our fellow boaters were either continuous cruisers like ourselves, or based in Lyme View marina, near Wilmslow.
After nearly six weeks with little movement it has been wonderful for us and the dogs to get back to what we love – pootling along and enjoying the journey. Sadly one of the reasons for our delay was vets tests for our dog Ziggy who it turns out has advanced cancer of the pancreas and bladder. There is nothing to be done so while as yet she is showing few symptoms, we have decided to make her last months as much fun as possible. That means cruising on the canals, cuddling and eating sausages.
We have three weeks from today to get to Ellesmere on the Llangollen canal, where we will meet up with Mandy’s two brothers and their wives who have hired a boat to share a holiday with us. We are really looking forward to that. Three weeks should be plenty of time, hopefully enough to also allow us a side trip up to Chester.
We are of course somewhat subdued with Ziggy’s news, but we are still loving the boating life, as is she.
We have been staying on our narrowboat this week, in a marina in Staffordshire. On the way down, Mandy asked me not to rush taking the boat out on a trip. In particular she did not want to travel when it is wet and windy. I know she is right. Our trip should be relaxing and fun, not a miserable chore. But I have to admit that I have just been itching to get behind the tiller. So I was delighted on Monday to wake up to a bright sunny day, and we set off south towards Great Haywood.
It was a crisp cold morning and as you can see in the picture, the ice sparkled on our newly painted roof. This was a chance to enjoy ourselves, and it was lovely to be back travelling at 3mph. Our first trip out is also an opportunity to check out everything still works. The good news was that the work done over the winter seems to have been successful. The bad news was that the battery charging warning light would not go off. This is a potentially big problem because we have brand new batteries, and if we let them lose too much charge, they will become useless.
Normally I would try to diagnose the problem using a “Victron” app on my phone, which can monitor the state of charge of the batteries and what power is going in and out. Unfortunately the app was not working either. I did some checks to make sure there was not a critical problem, like the engine belt failing, and we decided we needed to return to base. In a boat you cannot just turn around. You need to keep going until you can find a winding hole with space to turn the boat. In retrospect this was a good thing because we did get to enjoy travelling all day, including four locks to start rebuilding my windlass muscles for the season.
Overnight I managed to reset my electrical devices so that the app worked again, and the following morning our friendly engineer found a wire off on the alternator. He also fixed a long-standing leak we have had on the water tank overflow.
So all in all a good result. We have had a nice day out, checked everything is ready on the boat, and fixed some problems which is always satisfying. We need to pop back to Scotland next week but I really want to be boating. We just need a little more sun!
We will be getting up early tomorrow (22nd) because we need to be on the road b y 0530. We are travelling from Edinburgh to Brighton to spend Christmas with our son Rob and his fiancée Alessa. At best it is a nine hour journey plus break stops. However, the BBC website says that tomorrow will be the busiest road day of the year, with many people still working and many others, like us, travelling for Christmas. So we expect the worst.
There is also a yellow weather warning for high winds, and with the roof box on the car that does make us a little like a sail. We will have to be particularly careful on bridges.
I am not looking forward to it. When we are on the narrowboat we also have to be careful for winds. Particularly in marinas it can be exceptionally difficult to steer. But we are only going at 2 or 3 mph, and the beauty of being retired is that if we do not like the weather we can just moor up.
I think the biggest difference between travelling in a car and travelling in a narrowboat is that in a car, it is all about looking forward to the destination, while in a narrowboat, it is all about the journey itself.
But there aren’t any canals between Scotland and England, and even if there were, the 380 miles would take us about two months.
Christmas will not wait for us, and so we just need to grit our teeth tomorrow and face into the journey. At least we can stick on some Christmas songs to cheer us up. And when we get there I am sure we will have a really lovely week with our family and Alessa’s family,
So instead of Bah Humbug, I will be Ho Ho Ho and wish you and yours a very very merry Christmas.
We are nearly half way on our Outer Hebrides adventure. Two weeks in and two weeks to go. We have already seen all weathers, from torrential rain, to bright sunshine; from gale force winds to total stillness. I have been out every day and have been astounded by so many brilliant beaches, most of them completely empty.
I think the sun being so low in the sky helps, giving a dawn/dusk light throughout the day, and giving the seas a lovely turquoise colour. I love the peace. All you can hear are the waves, and an occasional bird. It feels as if being here is just perfect.
West beach on the island of Benbeluca is so perfect that a photograph was once used in a Thailand tourist brochure. It is a little colder here though!
I wonder what new vistas are in store for us in the second fortnight. I love these islands.
Near LochmaddyWest beach, BernerayHougharryThe isle of Vallay (only accessible at low tide)Barry Airport runway (yes, really!)VatersayAskernishEriskay, where the AM Politician was sunk in 1941., inspiring Whisky GaloreCreagorry
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