Five years ago, when I obtained my sea and inland boating licences, our two boys asked me what this "sea" and "inland" actually meant. "If I pass the sea licence, I can sail on all seas and with the inland licence I can sail on all lakes and rivers around the world," I tried to explain. To illustrate this, I pulled out the old school atlas, showed them Europe and got stuck on the Danube. "Theoretically, we could then travel from Passau through all these countries all the way to the Black Sea!"
Of course, the first question our little sailors asked after passing their exams was: "Dad, when are we going to the Black Sea?" I smile as I think back to the stubbornness of the two rascals, with which they demanded my promise of "Yes, we'll do it sometime", which I had made lightly at the time. And how the topic occupied us more and more as a family from then on. nd now we had actually dared to do it. We had been travelling for nine days. From Passau on the flooded Danube, along the Strudengau, the magnificent Wachau, we had visited Krems, Vienna, Bratislava, Estergom, Visegrad, Budapest, passed twelve locks and already, after 700 kilometres, collected 1000 impressions. The evening hours were barely long enough to process what we had experienced so far in our diaries.
Family, friends and acquaintances had declared us crazy, warned us and advised us against it, and even an experienced Danube captain had described our endeavour as "daring". After all, we not only wanted to sail as far as the Black Sea, but also back to Passau on our own keel, visiting all ten neighbouring countries, navigating all three estuaries and exploring the Danube delta on our own. And all this with a 30-year-old cabin cruiser that was actually far too small for the job, and with children. Wasn't it really crazy?
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