10 September. River Vecht. Utrecht to Weesp. 

I was so happy that the sun came out for my last full day on the boat. We had decided to get as far up the Vecht as possible, to leave a morning for a bike ride on Monday. Down came all the awnings, and the cockpit windows, for the ride up Utrecht's Oudegracht with its string of low bridges. So quiet this early sunday morning, compared to the gaggle of tour boats in the gracht yesterday. We passed not a soul except the odd pussycat on the wharves.

The lock out of the city is a huge one and hand operated. It takes forever to fill and empty so it was a fair old wait. We were stuck behind a German boat who constantly ground his bow thrusters to try and stay in place. Crikey! You'd think the racket alone would have made him quit. Anyhow we ended up stuck behind him for half the morning, grinding away and going WAYYYY too slowly. Much muttering from Skip until we came to a wide clear stretch and managed to get ahead of him.

We were stuck behind Captain Bowthrust for most of the morning.  

The Vecht is such a pretty river with so much of interest alongside the banks. You get a crick in the neck turning this way and that trying to see everything. Lots of lovely homes and gardens and of course hundreds of houseboats - from very swanky to, ahem, rather run down.

And every couple of kms there's another pretty little village with cutie bridges.

Naturally I had to look up property prices alongside the river. Unsurprisingly the fancy homes fetch multi millions but what was surprising was how expensive the house boats are - averaging out between 1/4 to 1/2 a million and that's without owning the bit of bank they are tied up to. They do come with a mooring, on the whole, for which one pays about 2000 a year rental. In many cases similar size houses along the river are cheaper than the houseboats. HUH. And with a house at least you can be sure it won't spring a leak at some point.

Huh? What was their architect thinking?

About half way down the river we stopped for a break at the small lock leading into the Loosdrecht lakes. There is a quirky café on the lock so we grabbed two chairs and whiled away some time watching the charter boats negotiate the lock. There are a couple of big charter operators inside the Loosdrecht lake and Sunday is their turnaround day so there were a lot of boats headed back to base after their week's charter. Most of them are glassfibre penichette's. Very roomy and with a different colour scheme they would make really comfy cruising boats. I imagine they sell them second hand.

We got to the bridge into Weesp at 16:02. The two minutes are important because the bridge man had just closed up for an hour's break. Bother, but we were eventually tied up inside the Weesp binnhaven by 18:00. Time for a quick walk and a final BBQ on the aft deck……

Tomorrow I shall be packing etc and we will head into Amsterdam on the train to spend the night with neice Heidi prior to my crack-o-dawn flight back to Lisbon. Skip will return to the boat and stay on for another week taking her back to homeport in Strandhorst and doing the usual chores of cleaning and winterising the boat. See how well planned this is on my part?

So bye from me. See you next year.