Not Cruising Port Cerises to Moret-sur-Loing

A small problem had developed overnight and it had a little to do with working out where we were going and a lot to do with working and who is and who won't be.   It seems that there is talk of a national strike, and no one can be sure that the waterways will not be affected.  

With a trainload of grandchildren and their parents arriving to an as yet undisclosed, and for that matter unknown place on Saturday, the responsibility falls on us to find a suitable location that we can reach in time, has access to all services, particularly railroad from the South and for lots of reasons it would be good if this were on a canal rather than a river.  

Rivers are big and wide and fast flowing and full of rather large ships which travel at twenty kilometres per hour, and while the chances of ever coming into physical contact with one are very slim indeed, sometimes as they zoom past it's hard to avoid the sort of feelings that one imagines a lady bird must have while flying along a major motorway.

We didn't intend to travel for twelve hours, that's not anywhere in any of the colour brochures we've seen, but we had woken early and we did leave, turning into the outer suburbs as quietly as Mr P could whisper, so as not to disturb Swiss guys.    They in turn, also not intending to travel for twelve hours noticed that we had gone once our fog had cleared and set off in hot pursuit.     The river locks themselves are two ships long and two ships wide, and our length is less than their width and every ship that ever there was was on the river today to get to where they were going before the strike, so at each lock we two ladybugs waited and slipped in to the cracks between the fleet that had passed us since the previous stop.

On the penultimate wait, Phil and Julie caught up in their much more fleet of foot barge, having that morning received a call to be in Singapore tomorrow for business, so during the wait they busily unloaded all their perishables into our little blue boat.   

We caught them eventually, at the end of day, and they came for dinner made from their ownwe  groceries, then fell gloriously unconscious, wondering how on earth, and why on earth for that mattter, we'd come to break our distance and time record in one day.

This is not cruising!