Euronating

My best photo of the leaning church tower at Leeuwarden was taken as we left on Saturday afternoon. I'd spent a happy couple of hours trying to catch up with this blog in a café with speedy wifi and then we'd walked the entire circuit of the city waterway.  Time to move on.

Writing now (12th July) we have severe technical issues with our laptop computer so I am unable to download the photo, or any others, from the camera. Until a new card arrives from the UK for the Dell we have no photos except those taken with the phone or tablet. And adding those is proving tricky. Bear with me! I will add them in as soon as I can.

Pic 243 leaving L with tower may follow

The scenery in rural inland Friesland is very pretty, as are the canalside houses. We especially liked the enormous Friesian barns converted to dwellings, but you'll have to do without my pictures for the technical reasons mentioned above. Likewise you're missing the tallest windmill in Friesland which I snapped in Burdaard. Sorry!

Pic 260 of Fresian barn house may follow

It's the weekend but even so commercial traffic here is minimal as there's a more direct canal route they can take to Groningen (with fixed bridges so no good to us).

There were a few (opening) bridges on the way and our out of date pilot book warned us these might be closed any time (it was 17.30 by the time we passed through Burdaard), but as we found elsewhere the service seemed to be better and more frequent than the books implied so we chugged through them all almost without checking our pace.

I say 'almost' because we did have to pay some bridge tolls here: these are collected by means of a clog proffered on a sort of fishing line from the bridge keepers office.  Photo to follow. Our late friend Jon Wainwright coined the term "to euronate" for this process and we can't better it.
€3 for 2 bridges in Burdaard and then €5 to cover all of Dokkum and we are done euronating and can stop under the windmills for the night.

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