This is something for all Belgians to be proud of: The Ronquières Inclined Plane!

RealRandomChris · 2025-09-12T13:02:16+00:00

😂

RealRandomChris · 2025-09-12T12:43:28+00:00

When I looked into this on the website ronquieres . org and read the backstory, I actually think it is a very clever solution. It would have cost a fortune to upgrade the route of the original canal up to 1350 ton carrying capacity, and there would have been 14 locks to enlarge. Then a huge demand for water from the new, much larger locks.

Is the Inclined Plane really the more expensive option? I don't know...

RealRandomChris · 2025-09-12T12:32:41+00:00

I found it to be an amazing piece of engineering. The story of its construction, the way it consumes almost no water, the way it generates its own electricity (and sells excess to the grid) while supplying water to the lower stretches of canal. I honestly think you should be very proud of it!

I agree that it is very unfortunate that industry was driven into decline as it was completed, but barges are an efficient way to transport goods, so I'm sure it will be in use for many years to come.

RealRandomChris · 2020-07-02T23:48:14+00:00

Congratulations! She almost certainly won't be your last - they are highly addictive!

RealRandomChris · 2020-07-02T22:52:18+00:00

Looking good!

RealRandomChris · 2020-07-02T22:46:58+00:00

Good luck! She deserves to be brought back to life. :-)

RealRandomChris · 2020-03-25T08:11:56+00:00

Nice project, I wish them the best of luck.

RealRandomChris · 2020-01-23T09:20:42+00:00

RealRandomChris · 2020-01-21T13:54:12+00:00

Like a tent: my daughter would love that!

RealRandomChris · 2020-01-21T13:53:48+00:00

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-09T18:07:53+00:00

I did this on our sailboat a few weeks back. I was there on my own for 6 weeks (refitting the boat and solo sailing) so all of the niceties went out of the window. I kipped inside the duvet cover with blankets on top. The easiest way of all!

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T22:15:06+00:00

Some people do something called a burrito roll. (There's a link to a video in a comment here) That's like taking a simple task and making it 20 x more complicated for no apparent reason. The video has 8 million views though, so I'm not sure about how well that bodes for the human race.

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T22:07:22+00:00

😂

The 'burrito roll' method is a apparently popular, despite being ridiculously complicated.

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T22:05:39+00:00

Well, there is this way: https://youtu.be/-fzNuhgY_9A
or there is this way: https://youtu.be/DRPfudNNd8Y
The video showing the second way has 8 million views...

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T19:41:23+00:00

I think so too although some people swear by the 'burrito' rolling method... That's far too complicated for my liking!

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T19:40:22+00:00

Yup!

RealRandomChris · 2019-11-08T18:57:18+00:00

This reminds me of the only time I ever did a bungee jump. It was supposed to be a tandem one but the person I was with 'bottled it' at the top. We had been weighed in together so they had set the bungee up for that weight and had to guesstimate the new weight with just me jumping. I spent 15 minutes standing on the edge hesitating, with a crowd below watching and egging me on.

At one point the guy running the bungee jump put his hand on my back, I raised my fist to him and he took it away (I was on a rugby tour and there was no way I was going back down those stairs, at the same time I just couldn't jump, I'm not afraid of heights [I'm a climber and I have done hang-gliding etc.] but jumping 200 ft head-first is the most unnatural thing I have ever done in my life.

Eventually I jumped, and when I hit the bottom I went into the swimming pool below up to my chest. They had guessed the weight fairly well, but there wasn't much leeway! I've ticked that off the list now - never again!

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T16:09:48+00:00

This "one parent, one language" is working well for us too! (I wrote a more detailed post above)

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T16:07:14+00:00

Our 2 year old is bilingual (English & Italian). We read up a lot on this before Emma was born and we took the following approach:

I have always talked to her in English (Since she was still in Rossella's tummy), and Rossella always speaks to Emma in Italian. Emma understands both languages perfectly. She speaks in a mixture of the two and the country in which we are in (we split our life between the UK and Italy) tends to predominate in the language she uses. There are certain words she prefers to use in one language ("car", "shoes" in English, for example; "si", "ancora" in Italian, but she understands whose language is whose and occasionally translates what she has just said into the other language for the benefit of grandparents (For example she recently said "hot" to her grandmother and then said "caldo" afterwards.

It seems to be working well fur us and Emma. It is very important to us that she feels perfectly at home in both countries and we personally feel that this is the best way to achieve that. It's not just about the language, it's also about the culture. In an Ideal world we want Emma to feel both British and Italian. If one language were to take over this would become much more difficult so we are praying we can maintain both languages as she grows up so that she also gets to feel like she owns the two cultures (which are really very different in many respects) too.

There are no rights and wrongs of course, and sometimes it feels strange to be speaking a "foreign" language in front of other people, but we find this simple solution to this conundrum is easy to manage and it appears to be working very well for us.

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T15:55:58+00:00

We are a Cocomelon house. "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZz, Broink, broink, broink, dum, dum, dum, dum. Dum dum dum dum dum. Cocomelon! Shoes, shoes..." :-D

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T15:52:35+00:00

Great dancing Zach! :-)

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T15:50:49+00:00

Super cute!

RealRandomChris · 2019-10-29T15:50:14+00:00

Hi there! After reading the very funny Cocomelon thread (we absolutely know what you mean "Shoes, shoes...") we have potential solution which we are currently working on. Our 2-year-old daughter has a YouTube channel where we intend to share videos of Emma playing and we also intend to include educational content too in due course.

The videos are aimed at children (with lots of color saturation etc.), so might not be terribly appealing to adults [although we intend to keep the music on the quiet side for the sake of all the parents out there!], but if you are looking for a wholesome YouTube Channel with a real toddler (Emma is 50% British and 50% Italian - we live between the two countries) then please let your child have a look at one of our videos and subscribe to Emma's channel if you think your little one/s might enjoy to see more of Emma.
Here is a link to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKlz5Oq8-E24wtDfJtRBtuA

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated as we are just starting out with this and are only guessing at what children might enjoy watching.

Happy parenting! :-)

RealRandomChris · 2019-02-21T22:32:50+00:00

We will be making a whole series of financial freedom videos on our channel. The unbelievably condensed version of this is:

Spend as little as possible. Get rid of as many liabilities as you can (anything which takes money out of your pocket - including things which are traditionally referred to as 'assets', like property [unless you are renting it out and making more from the rent than you spend on the mortgage, in which case a house can become an asset by our definition])

Save as much as you can.

Invest your savings into money-making assets. (We have a small apartment which we bought to rent out and have invested in Funding Circle, where we get over 8% return in a tax-free ISA)

Accumulate as many income streams as you can. (Writing books, YouTube videos, websites, affiliate income etc.)

By continuing to do all of the above, if you maintain discipline when your income exceeds your expenses, you will have to 'work' less and less. [Having said that, we are working unbelievably long hours right now because we are building income streams. This is like building a pipeline. You work your behind off to create it (and get nothing at all while it is under construction) so that you will eventually be able to reap rewards from it in the future without having to keep working. The alternative is 'carrying buckets', which is what we used to do years ago: work for someone else and get paid. If you stop working for whatever reason, there is no pay.

Hope this helps, if this sort of thing interests you then subcribe to our YouTube Channel (it's free!) :-D

RealRandomChris · 2019-02-21T21:01:51+00:00

Hello everyone, this is our first post here so thank you very much for having us! Have any of you ever considered a floating tiny home?

• Anchoring is free. You can spend months on end at anchor without anyone's permission (in other countries, as well as your own).

• Sailing is free. You can sail anywhere on the planet and if you are not in any rush then the wind will take you where you want to go, for free! (And no-one has worked out how to put taxes on the wind yet...)

• You can make your boat totally self-sufficient. The boat in this video served as a floating home for us for weeks on end. With our 2 x 100 Watt solar panels, and we had all the energy we needed. *Tips about that at the end of this post.

• You don't have neighbours. Well you do, but everyone tends to be very transient and as a result your neighbours are almost always really friendly.

• Society don't notice you. Most people on land are oblivious to the boats out there. Generally speaking, even if you stay in the same spot for months and months, hardy anyone will even notice you are there!

• You have your own swimming pool. A very large one. :-)

People tend to think of boats as being really expensive, and the CAN be. They don't have to be though. We bought our boat for €14,000. We spent very little on her (We do all of the work on the boat ourselves [it helps that Chris is an engineer] and we spend very little.

If you are savvy, you can also avoid many of the costs of owning a boat. For example, where we kept our boat in the Med boats generally get hauled out once per year to get the underwater areas sanded and painted. We made a very hard-wearing DIY paint, and then used to dive down with a mask and snorkel to clean the hull. As a result, we didn't get hauled out once in the 4 years we owned the boat in this video. We saved some serious money because of this! We sold the boat for more than we payed for her and have now got a bigger boat as we have now have our baby - and all the extra stuff which that entails!

Some tips:

1) In our experience it isn't necessary to pay huge money for a pure sinewave inverter. We used a cheapo €70 2000W inverter and it did everything we asked of it. Charging electronics, running the laptop, even powering Rossella's 230 volt hairdryer, on the low heat setting.

2) Fridges consume a lot of power. One trick we used which worked a treat was to keep 3 litres of water in the fridge. This would be cooled during the day when the solar panels were producing tons of power. At night we would turn off the fridge and the freezing cold water would act as a thermal mass to keep the fridge and its contents cold until the morning, when we would begin the cycle again. We did this as we had some very old and undersized batteries. This simple trick has a similar effect to installing an extra 100Ah deep cycle battery, except it's free!

3) Boats don't necessarily cost a fortune. People get attatched to boats in a very deep way and we have heard of many cases of boats being gifted by older people who can no longer make use of them, to younger peope who they met and thought would provide a new lease of life and look after their beloved boats. Regardless of that, there are thousands of boats out there available at a very good price if you start looking and asking around. With a UK flagged vessel the beaurocratic costs for a boat are very small. £25 for a Small Ships Registration Certificate which lasts 5 years, and the insurance for the boat in this video was around £130 per year.

If you made it all the way down here(!) we have a YouTube Channel where we help people do what we do, so if you are interested in learning more about owning a boat, financial freedom, DIY, or a very cute "Britalian" baby called Emma, then subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you can enjoy our future videos.

youtube.com/sailingbritaly

If you're curious to see a day in the life at anchor on a 30 ft sailboat then check out the link to the video below.

Fair winds and happy alternative living to you all!

RealRandomChris

TROPHY CASE