An eventful day

Yesterday started off going to see the cheese market in Gouda.  It was mostly just a market like they have in our village every week.  Which was fine but a little disappointing.  The cheese market is put on for the tourists, so there's a couple or rows of cheese and a couple of guys dressed up and a lot of folks taking photos.  It was OK,  but a little weird.

 

Anywa, I'm glad we went, but we certainly didn't need to stay long.  Back to the boat and we were off.  We had a bridge to go through, then an immediate right to a bridge and a lock.  But.... The bridgemaster at the first bridge told us that the lock had broken down and we'd have to go south, the way we came in.  Ok. 

Off we went, checking the chart and there is a slightly longer loop but we would come out at the same place further down the canal.  No problem, back to the lock into the Holland Ijssel (?) river, and as the door opens, out swims a duck and her ducklings, they'd all just locked through.  In we go, down go the doors, this is a guillotine style lock, and we wait, and wait.  Broken down!!!! Ok.  The lock keeper had been super friendly and he lived on his boat near where we had moored.  He offered us tea and coffee, we thanked him, but we're at home.  Time for lunch and a bit of r&r. 

The lock guys turned up and we were off!!!! Great!!!! 

We turned right to head down the river and at the first corner, what do we see? The back end of a big cruise ship coming upstream, around the corner, backwards.  Instead of trying to deal with him at the corner, we turned around, got way over on one side so he could pass us on the straight away, but he was edging closer and closer to us.  Eventually we gave a big old angry-ish arm wave for him to move over and he did, but we had a meter to the riprap on one side and a meter to him on the other...It was all fine in the end, but still!!!  By law, we have to give way to all commercial traffic, always, however they aren't supposed to smear us against the shore when they can avoid it!!!! 

We had a tight squeeze with another barge fuether on, but that was just a narrow channel and a big boat.  Our air draf is 2.35m.we went under two bridges advertised as 2.5m.  One was.  One was about 2.4.  Ho hum. Then, the place we'd planned to tie up had disappeared, so on and on.  We ended up tied up in a gorgeous park in Alphen aan de Rijn, but there's a highway across the canl and it was pretty loud.  Fine, but not brilliant.  Great dog walking though!!!!