A few days ago I may have accidentally made some passing reference to the flooded Marne bearing some resemblance to the upper reaches of the Brisbane River. This was of course in principal an awful thing to do, like comparing one's mother's cooking with that of one's new bride. Having now travelled a further hundred or so kilometres down it's swollen path, I must say however that it does remind us a little of the Brisbane River, except of course for the vineyards of the Champagne Hills rolling past, and the seven hundred year old buildings and the stone bridges which all seem to have had the centres of their spans err, "forcibly removed" at some point in the past, to be reinstated at some later time and in some cases there is evidence that this may have happened more than once.
It provides, perhaps not surprisingly a rather calm and peaceful back drop for one's wanderings and it truly deserves a journey involving weeks or months of idleness to enable a satisfactorily thorough exploration, but, if we hadn't quite made up our mind completely before we retired for the night, the tapping on the hull of flood-borne logs wandering past during what was supposed to be slumber time contributed to a steely resolve come morning to be done with the river post haste.
Sixty rather relaxed overcast and too-damp-to-go-outside-anyway kilometres and seven hours later, a new and we suspect never to be repeated record, we were wandering around the streets of Meaux congratulating ourselves on our efficiency, which in the space of two days, has sent our carefully prepared schedule into its final death spiral.
We are here, where Brie was invented on market-eve, and there is so much to see and do but if yesterday we could hear the sirens of Paris looming large, today we are but fifty kilometres away, and we can smell it.
Or is it Mr Perkins we can smell?
Or the Brie?
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