Ravels to Brecht

Ooh, a bit chilly today!  Sunny and warm out of the wind, but there was fairly stiff breeze from the NE.  Woolly hats and gloves weather.

The bridges and locks close at 3.00 on Saturday afternoon and don't open till Monday morning, so we decided to just see how far we could get before 3.00.  We were aiming for a town called Brecht, but had 9 moving bridges and 1 lock to get through.  T

The first half of the trip was lovely with the canal running through a forest.  At last we are beginning to see trees in bloom.

Lots of people were out walking dogs, or throwing sticks for then to swim after sticks in this case.

As usual there were many, many lycra clad cyclists in formation, and a kayak school.  These lads had an instructor riding alongside them on the tow path shouting instructions. 

About half an hour later they had turned to go in our direction and came flying past us at a great rate of knots.

Ian got into the sanding again - not a good picture but I'm not good at driving and taking photos at the same time.  One or the other suffers, and better poor photos than hitting the canal bank!

We passed a very fancy yacht club. 

At the only lock we had a lovely lady operator, very friendly. 

Then we came passed this very interesting movable bridge - it is a pontoon across the river which gets moved to the side when a boat comes through.

But they are building a new one. 

The bridges and lock were all very quick so we arrived at Brecht at about 2.15.  We did not want to go into a paying marina again tonight and the last section of the route we did today was rather bleak, with a lot of heavy industrial plants, and the canal sides looked very shallow.  Just before the marina we found a laybye with a couple of interesting looking boats so that is where we stopped.  Pics tomorrow, we will be here till Monday morning.