Narrowboat Temujin- Where will we go in 2012?: 2012

What with medical problems for both of us - Mike was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during a routine over sixties screening and I found out that I had Meniere's disease (and, very fortunately for me, have had no symptoms since) plus various other reasons to visit the UK for longer than normal, we have spent less time on the boat than ever before and, for the first time in its thirty nine years, Temujin has not moved from its winter mooring - it's still attached to the pontoon in Conde-sur-Marne.

Never ones to waste time doing nothing, we have been doing some refitting of the interior. Whoever it was that said "You can paint the outside of a boat as much as you like, but it will still rust away from the inside", they were spot on. It started when we noticed flakes of rust on the end of the bed several years ago and we said "We must see what's causing that, probably under the gunwales needs some work". That was the understatement of the year.

Rust on the cabin wall back of the shower cubicle.

When the cladding came off the bedroom walls and we saw rust flakes throughout the glassfibre we knew we were facing a long job. We've stripped the bedroom and shower area back to bare steel, removed the rust (which wasn't as bad as it looked) repainted it, re-insulated and re-cladded the walls, done the plumbing and wiring and now we're in process of refitting all the fitted furniture. With any luck we'll have it all back together before Christmas.

Same wall, now almost back to "as new"

And lots of new plumbing!

Plans for next year are to meet up with Wandering Snail in Belgium (as we did in 2011!) and head to the far north of the Netherlands to access the safest route for a narrowboat into Germany. Then we'll have the long slog across the Mitteland canal, to winter 2013/14 on the Polish border in East Germany, and maybe we'll have a little time for exploring on the way (we've done the trip twice before but it will be the first time for the Snails) keeping our fingers crossed that we actually get to Poland in 2014! So watch this space for a link to the next blog!
And here is the link to the next blog:-
http://nbtemujin2013.blogspot.fr/