A Little Bit of Googling
25 August 2010
After we got back to Bern, I figured it wouldn't hurt just to have a quick look, so I Googled “Berendina Barge” just to see what I found. I found the owner's website for Berendina, saying that indeed it was for sale. They had some pictures of the inside of the barge and the one that blew me away was the main bedroom – this was not my idea of what a barge looked like! Unfortunately, they didn’t mention a price – which only confirmed my previous thoughts that it was out of our league (if the main bedroom was anything to go on!).
But the Google search for Berendina mentioned another barging website (www.ApolloDuck.com) which seemed to be some type of Classified Ads for used barges. So I checked it out and here I found the price for Berendina – EUR295,000 (about AUD420,000 at the time). So, I was right and I was wrong. It was expensive, but not as expensive as I had thought. After seeing the main bedroom, I was convinced it would be closer to a million dollars than half a million! And with the strengthening of the Aussie dollar, the price in AUD had come down from AUD500k to AUD420k in the past 12 months – now was the perfect time to buy (or so I told myself).
