René’s old blog

This site is some twenty-five years old, and it contains lots of ancient stuff, much of it utterly dated and useless.

Sorry about that.

If anything, I post very unevenly, and about whatever occupies me.

Some featured posts

See all featured posts.

Most recent posts

  • Launching from a beach

    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 without its drawbacks. The shore there is a road which is 1-2m over the water…

  • UFO – Unidentified Floating Object

    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 it, but waterproof point-and-shoot cameras aren’t always that great for taking photographs, so this was…

  • 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.

  • Reflections

    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 do a good job at reflecting 🙂Santa Maria della Salute Santa Maria della Salute from…

  • Happy Holidays

    Happy Holidays to everybody out there, paddling or not.

  • 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 to the north side of the island. Another purpose of the journey, for me, was…

  • 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 scopo del viaggio, per me, era di rivedere tanti amici siciliani, soprattutto nel palermitano e…

  • Sicily Circumnavigation 2010

    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 settlements, Roman ruins, Arab architecture, Norman city fortresses, Spanish towers, baroque cities, active vulcanoes and…

  • 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 have a Vodafone number on my phone, on a prepaid contract as they won’t make…