In Eemdijk, a small town

May 29, 2019

I have a new gallery.  They put up a number of my paintings.  Check them out at https://www.artsy.net/design-art-concepts/artist/gary-j-kirkpatrick  

We have been on Viking for almost a month, making necessary repairs, learning how things work, making it more comfortable for us, going through the previous owner’s tools, nuts, bolts screws, spare parts and so on.  We also had some painting to do.  Our Dutch friend painted the upper deck for us.  His 50 years of experience of steel boat ownership has been really helpful, not just on the painting but a lot of other matters as well.  His wife Ada knows a lot too, and helped us recover our mooring skills.  In our first boat we traveled over 2000 kilometers between Holland, Belgium and France but that was 18 years ago.  We went through hundreds of locks, docked a thousand times or more, but still, you get rusty. 

We left Weesp and turned south to the Eem River.  This is where we met Kees and Ada on our second night out in Caprice in 2000.  That mooring is gone as Eemdijk has grown and looks more prosperous.  There is another mooring a bit further upriver so we moored there.  There are fields and a bike path on one side and a prosperous farm on the other.  A friendly boater helped with the lines, but left later so we spent the night alone under the stars in the relentless Dutch wind.

There are numerous bikers and some walkers as well.  If you go to Eemdijk you can take a small ferry across the river into town.  That ferry was not here in 2000. 

Today we leave for Edam, on the IJsselmeer.  This inland sea is rather like Lake Pontchatrain.  It can get rough, but you pick your weather.  It should be flat today.