Buy a beer – and get adventure!
As soon as the boat comes down to a river, with green mountains rising on both sides, everything is entirely different.
It is exciting and varied.
It is an adventure!
I’ve said it before: I love sailing and being on the open sea, but there’s something special about river sailing too.
In my videos about sailing from The Baltic to The Mediterranean you can follow on a bit different boat trip. But the trip I have just come home from now can best be summed up with this little episode from Verdun in France:
“You just have to show us the boat and offer a beer,” says the guitarist in English with a French accent.
It is eleven o’clock in the evening and we are standing in the street, a few meters from the river La Meuse in Verdun. The French summer heat is no longer oppressive, but shorts and a t-shirt are still enough to keep us warm.
I speak five languages, but unfortunately French is not one of them. Of course, that makes it more difficult when you, like me, love to talk to people. But still, it is surprisingly easy as we sail down through France from the Netherlands and Belgium on this trip.
“Do you play the guitar?” asked one of the women in the group of happy people as we passed them a little earlier.
“Um, well… yes…” I answered a little sloppily in English, and suddenly my cousin Karin and I were sitting in the middle of a group of French people with a guitar in the hand. The only song I could think of in that surprising moment was one with Danish Kim Larsen. Luckily it was “This is my life”, where the lyrics are in English, so it worked anyway.
Because I dared to say yes to getting out of my comfort zone, we have now joined the group of people. A motley group of men and women, where the youngest is in high school and the oldest is retired. Some speak English, some don’t. Still, we talk to everyone, because even those who have difficulty with anything other than French make an effort.
“I didn’t understand that,” says a man when I explain that we are on our way to the Moselle-river. He pulls over a friend who translates my English into French, and then our conversation can continue.
I hand the guitar over to one of the others, who strikes the strings. A woman sings, and no matter what chords are played on the guitar, she knows the lyrics. The rest of us sing along to the chorus as we sip our beer.
I get the guitar again and start the prelude to “Proud Mary”. The others quickly start singing along.
When we get to the third verse, everything seems to be connected:
If you come down to the river
Bet you gonna find some people who live
You don’t have to worry cause you have no money
People on the river are happy to give
It is also the helpfulness and friendliness we ourselves constantly encounter on the river and around it. Not only tonight over a beer with singing and guitar, but also in the locks, in the harbors and on the street.
In a lock in the Netherlands we were invited for espresso by a German, in a port in the Netherlands we were invited for white wine by Margrethe who had read “The last idiot is not born yet”, and on an island in Belgium the harbor master thought that we not have to pay harbor fees, but instead spend the money at the café.
Out on the street, in the warm French night, I am completely absorbed in the hospitable atmosphere and suddenly I say:
“How lovely it is here. What can I do to become French too?”
The others laugh and smile and the one who has now got the guitar says:
“You just have to show us the boat and offer us a beer.”
The whole group laughs again, because they know that we can’t all be on little Mini Lisa. No one expects us to offer them beer either, because we are already accepted. We are already part of the group and included – even if we are not French.
Have a great summer!
PS. You can see videos with more strange and funny experiences from the rivers here…
