Fading Memories

Much as we love Nancy, the weather has been iffy, and we'll be back a few more times this summer so it was time to get out there and float with the big boys.

Out of the canal we drove and into the Moselle River for our solo first crack at a commercial lock, which is a bit like being in the Mooloola River with the tide coming in really fast.  Say two and a half metres in five minutes.

I am not sure whether we'd have known if we had been scathed in the process as I've never really thought till now what actually being scathed looks or feels like.   I do know, and can say with some certainty however that we survived completely unscathed.

A slight misreading of the chart a little later had us closer to being scathed though.  Accidentally  by-passing the floating pontoons at the town of Liverdun, a most unlikely name for a village "situated on a wooded hill overlooking the Moselle, and often called the the little Switzerland of Lorraine," we continued around to a little inlet clearly marked "Port de Plaisance".

It seemed sensible, get out of the current and the weather and the way of the passing ships.

If one can imagine a fiord, only nowhere near as deep or as wide and with barely enough water to float the boat, one has a fair idea of what this "Port" turned out to be.   In small boat terms we'd call it a gunk hole, with room we thought for one, carefully secured across the shallows it reminded us of mooring around the edges of Lake Cootharaba (except with tree studded cliffs surrounding us) , but we managed to squeeze two in, and later in the evening after taking a deep breath, two more.  

The village is a kilometre or three away, but the spot is so protected and pretty, well we decided that we'll give the village a miss, at least until the baguette calls on the morrow morn.