A day doing not much St-Jean-de-Losne

The National Quay in the heart of town is stepped, and barely above us the restaurant decks hover with their umbrellas and the gentle clinking of glasses and clattering of cutlery which begins in the middle of the day and continues into the night.   It's barely audible, one of those holiday sounds, like the sloshing of the water that accompanies the gentle rocking of the hull when a barge passes.

The quay, the restaurants and I suppose even the waves are all relics from a time when thousands of commercial ships passed by each year, and the port was a thriving industrial centre.  Now all all the services are aimed squarely at a new industry; leisure.

I'm not sure how "leisure" and "industry" came to be used as complimentary terms.  I have always been led to understand they are diametrically opposed concepts.

Never the less when a town is prepared to provide free mooring and electricity for us, the least we can do is to contribute to its leisure industry.   We thought perhaps the best way of doing that would be to watch the sun go down from one of those restaurant decks.  Perhaps to fully appreciate its trajectory we thought that it might be a good idea to start this observation process at say, lunchtime.

To sustain us while we did so we thought that partaking of the menu of the day at the Cafe de la Navigation might be quite a sensible thing to do as well, so with Doug and Susan with whom we would part company on the morrow, we attempted to deplete Burgundy of all its snail, rabbit with mustard sauce and crème brûlée.

Sadly perhaps, not one commercial ship passed while we were there, this was not a day for making waves!