Bulgaria with Noodles

I finally managed to persuade Irena to take a day off and to go somewhere more interesting than IKEA. She had been somewhat less than enthusiastic when I told her that I had bought the Itiwit kayak, but she was a bit more positive when we arrived at Lake Iskar. The lake is just south of Sofia's dreadful ring road and really it is a reservoir. Sofiots flock there at the weekends to go fishing, picnicking and they even get out onto the water. The Itwit inflatable kayak really is well-designed and it takes about six or seven minutes to get it ready for the water. (No, this blog is definitely NOT sponsored by Itiwit or Decathlon, just in case you were wondering!) The double-action pump works really well and you do not need any special knowledge or expertise. How you get from the land into the kayak is a bit awkward and you might just have to resign yourself to getting a bit wet and / or muddy. The bad news about paddling is that if you keep changing sides, first on the ri...

It was, of course, the Water Rat in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows who says what is probably one of the most famous quotations in the English language, the one about how enjoyable it is to be messing about in boats. (While I was in the Crimea, I re-read the book twice and was struck by its neo-paganism, especially the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”.)  Anyway, Peter and I took the Water Rat’s advice and went off to Decathlon, on Sofia’s ring road, to buy a three-man Itiwit kayak. It is excellent! (I wrote about the joys of kayaking in another piece for this blog, You can't have your kayak and heat it .) Just south of the ring road is Lake Iskar. It is really a reservoir for Sofia, but it is also a place where Sofiots go at the weekends, to get away from it all with some fishing and a picnic. We managed to find somewhere quite close to the lake to park and it took us about ten minutes to pump up the different parts of the kayak. Although it does...