Aqueducts

Metz is going to be a problem.   

In our heads we've said we'd stay for two nights, but walking around the old city for just an hour or two has thrown a spanner into any plans we may have made to move on.  They reckon there is three thousand years worth of history here.

Never make plans should be our motto.

We are moored between a barge that could easily pass for a giant piece of jewellery, so fine are it's perfect superyacht finishes, and on the other side Kurt's ex-policeboat from the thirties which makes our Joyeux look positively palatial.  If Kurt and we were to sell our boats and pool our resources to buy the barge we'd be short by at least one and half million Euros and we all three laugh at the contrast across the dock, including the Swiss owner of the superbarge who revels in the fact that he too is paying 12€ per night rent in the historic heart of the city including power and water, although we suspect he won't go ashore to shower.  He found a mooring in the river for free last night, we paid ten Euro.   If we moored for free every night for the next three thousand years, we'd save enough for a boat just like his, and we'd be as old as Metz.

Today we have waved to the bargees as they lumbered past with their 3,000 ton payloads and marvelled at how they always have time to return the favour, we've seen aqueducts (real Roman ones this time), and were on the spot as the train went through one of the arches at three hundred kilometres per hour, and wondered about "progress" and how life might have been if the Italians had moved to Australia a few thousand years before they did.

They never seemed to have problems making plans and sticking to them.