René's old blog
Whatever I feel like posting, whenever
This site goes back some twenty-five years, so it is bound to be full of stale links and irrelevant information. It is, at best, updated irregularly.
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Somehow myself, Steve Lutsch from Canada and my friend Loretta from Venice, end up in a Canadian-French TV programme, called “À faire en Italie – La liste de François-Etienne”. I’ve only seen this little bit, so I have no idea…
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Launching from a beach
For almost four years I’ve been doing my kayaking tours of Venice from a camp site on the Lido di Venezia. It has been, and is, in many ways a good launch spot close to Venice, but it is not…
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UFO – Unidentified Floating Object
When paddling around Venice we often see slightly weird boats around — different shapes, odd names, alternative behaviour — but the other day I encountered something in a category of its own. I tried to get a good photo of…
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Paddling Planet errors
There are a lot of errors on Paddling Planet recently, mostly HTTP errors 404 (Not Found) and 409 (Conflict), but they all relate to Blogger and change all the time, so I assume the fault is at Blogger.
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Reflections
At the end of the year we’re supposed to reflect on the year that passed. I have found that a bit hard this year, so I’ve decided to leave the reflections to the vaporetto (water bus) platforms of Venice. They…
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Happy Holidays
Happy Holidays to everybody out there, paddling or not.
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Circumnavigation of Sicily
The circumnavigation of Sicily won’t be this time. Progress has been much too slow, and the time I have will not allow us to recover the delay. We’ve done about 125km in a week, and we’ve only just made it…
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Periplo della Sicilia
Il periplo della Sicilia non si fa questa volta. Il progresso è stato troppo lento, e il tempo disponibile non permette di ricuperare. In una settimana abbiamo fatto sui 125km, e siamo appena arrivati sulla costa nord dell’isola. Un altro…
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Sicily Circumnavigation 2010
In March, 2010, I intend to paddle around the Mediterranean island of Sicily, a trip of some 900 km along a stunningly beautiful coastline, where, besides the natural beauty of the coast and the sea, we’ll pass Greek temples, Phoenician…
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The Joys of Being a Foreigner – Paying Online
This is really nothing new, as it has bothered me for a couple of years now, but since I’ve ended up doing a series of Being a Foreigner posts, I can just as well toss in this grievance too. I…
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The Joys of Being a Foreigner – Cittadinanza Digitale
The Cittadinanza Digitale – digital citizenship – is a very laudable project of the City of Venice with the scope of bringing fast wireless internet to all citizens for free. As far as I have understood, the project started when…
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The Joys of Being a Foreigner – Opening a Bank Account
When I decided to stay here in Venice for good, one of the first things to do is to open a bank account. You can only have your money lying around in envelopes for about so long 🙂 I went…