The snow storm has extinguished the familiar lights of Bozeman and the Gallatin valley that are spread out beneath our house. The kitchen is warm and bright, a beef stew simmering on the stove fills the house with a comforting aroma and our guest are on their way. Fall weather is a fact of life, not an excuse. The wind is noisy as it buffets the windows and doors, the house is warm inside. I make the final preparations for dinner while Lori continues to straighten thing up around the house.
HJ and Tammy settle in with a glass of wine before dinner as we begin to describe the trip we had just completed. They are good friends, I can tell them half baked ideas and I will get an honest answer. We look at photos and visit about the pleasures and trials of the trip. We casually entertain the idea of going to Europe and renting a boat for a trip, knowing that purchasing one was impractical. They are game for the conversation and have ideas of their own.
Over the next few weeks we continue to visit with friends about our adventure, most were surprised and somewhat intrigued by our experiences. This along with trying to adjust to our real life again kept me considering options that would enable the continuation of the experiences that we had.
One morning while enjoying my morning ritual, surfing the news while drinking my first cups of coffee, I did a search for boats for sale in France. One of the first websites I came across was the site that I had used to research rental boat options, Holidays H2O. The company has a couple of harbors in France from which they broker boats and display them on their website.
As I was wasting time pursuing through their site I found some good looking boats that weren’t as expensive as I had expected them to be. I looked at the details of the boats and kept thinking that something must be wrong with these, since I have always assumed that boats were expensive.
Over the next few weeks I continued to day dream in the mornings with an expanded search though different boat brokers, and I continued to find reasonably priced boats. They weren’t new by any means, most of those I found that were affordable were of the 1970s to 1990s vintage, but they looked good. Even so, I thought what good is it to have a boat in Europe while I have to work in the U.S.
***
This is the first installment of the second chapter in the ongoing series that details our introduction to river cruising on the European waterways and to our purchase and outfitting of our own boat to for travel and living in Europe. If you are interested in being notified of future installment releases, Subscribe to this series in the sidebar on the right.
If you missed the Previous installments they can be found under the category “A New Adventure-Series”