Hazey Days: Made it to Maastricht

Continued along the Maars, great river, very interesting, pretty in places and industrial in others.

We stopped in Hassun, small (and cheap) marina, very friendly moored against a grass bank. Felt left out as the other motorboat's got out their deck chairs and sat on the grass - went to the bar instead.

Lunch stop at Aachen - best cake shop ever

We continued upstream into a huge area of lakes, filled with boats and tourists, near Roemond and then onto Maasbracht. Maastricht has the deepest lock in the Netherlands - 12metres! it was like entering hades and then being lifted out into the sunshine - even GPS failed to work down there.

We met the harbourmaster from Hassun near Roemond in his 50' motorboat - he told us of a great ice-cream stop on the way to Maasbracht, we followed him through the locks and rafted alongside his very, very expensive boat to squeeze in to the mooring and nipped across his boat for ice creams.

Look at the pictures of the ship going through - for scale the red dot is a crewman.

Series of pictures showing ship going into Hollands deepest lock

man in red on ship for scale

We had chatted to a Dutch lady a few days earlier who said that Maastricht would be very busy at the weekend as Andre Rieu was playing a series of concerts in the town centre so we had a couple of slow half days to avoid being swamped by Rieu-ites; they were still there when we arrived on Monday. The town has been taken over with Rieu fever. Every restaurant has a special Rieu menu.

Maastricht is great though - very pretty, old and genteel town. There is a wall in the middle of the river, connecting two bridges and you can moor for free in the heart of the town - keeps getting better!

Stopping here for a couple of days to do the tourist thing then heading off to Belgium. We are now south of the UK so its a bit of a milestone - although we do head a bit north into Belgium before going south again towards France. Choice of routes coming up when we get to Namur - one squeakily shallow but possibly do-able - but very pretty sounding or the other - less shallow with a huge boat lift but longer - will decide at Namur.