The Road to hell is … (16/12/24)

…. paved with good intentions

As always, despite good intentions, the lure of just doing whatever we wanted to do while cruising tended to supersede keeping up to date with our blog/journal. So, once again, we are in catch-up mode. If you care to read the posts as they trickle out over the next few months, you will belatedly get an idea of what we were up to – and we will have a record for our dotage.

But, we do at least owe you a brief overview before ‘normal service’ resumes and we publish more substantive posts.

We had a simply marvellous cruising season. No particular problems, the travel along our planned route was, essentially routine, untroubled by water levels, weeds or infrastructure failures. We made new friends, connected with old friends and spent time travelling with great companions. This, and more, will be detailed in subsequent posts.

Summary of 2024

But perhaps high-level summary, which, although missing the interesting details, is how we tend to finish documenting a season.

To remind you, this was our preferred route (from Migennes along the purple then red-coloured path) to Auxonne:

This is what we actually accomplished:

And you can see we cruised everywhere we wanted to and on two more canals than we intended – certainly a success. In fact, this was our first unencumbered season of cruising since 2018. Five seasons lost to: blockages (2019), COVID (2020 & 2021), refurbishing and getting to a shipyard (2022) and overplating and painting (2023).

Statistically, we covered 846 km, 253 locks and 4 bridges. We spent 201 hours cruising during the 44 days of actual travel, within the 99 days after we left Migennes until we arrived at Auxonne.  Catharina Elisabeth used about 516 L of diesel at an average consumption of 2.56 L/km or 2.6 L/h and speed of 4.2 km/h.

Today, we shelter here in Sunbury where it is sunny and the temperature is 43ºC (109ºF)

while Catharina Elisabeth is tucked up in Auxonne where it will be raining and 9ºC.

Plane tickets have been purchased for a reunion in late May for the start of our next season together.

A substantive, catch-up post will follow tomorrow.