Down the highway Dijon to St-Jean-de-Losne

We didn't set out to travel all day, intent as ever on taking it easy, stopping for lunch and perhaps not starting again.

I can't say for sure whether it was the break in the weather that made conditions so pleasant but it turned out that we took it easy, stopped for lunch and then accidentally travelled all day, drifting among the cornfields on a mirror and we may have kept going were in not for simply running out of road in the end.

The "road" from Dijon to the Saone is long and straight, thirty kilometres long and straight as a die, and if one wasn't aware of the twenty-two locks along the way, one would swear it was dead flat as well, which I suppose given that it is comprised of water it probably actually is.  

Our path took us across the Burgundy Plains named presumably because they are not hills, through fields of corn and wheat other stuff which we couldn't recognise from the boat but which was probably edible. We've often heard the journey described as "uninteresting", some even see travelling the distance as a bit of a chore.   

We wonder at just how uninterested it's detractors would be after the first thirty kilometres driving anywhere west of the Great Dividing Range, so we tend to differ in that appraisal, perhaps because it was the place we saw our first proper autumn, the water invisible under a carpet of golden leaves, or perhaps in parts it reminds us of places in another land, where long straight roads stretch out the blacktop replaced by mirages  which make them look incredibly like these very waterways, albeit it's been quite a while since we've seen kangaroo among the roadkill.   

The urge to continue through the day may well also have stemmed subconsciously from long days travelling in those other places, but whatever the reason, we stopped a few hundred metres short of the place most consider to be the crossroads of the inland waterways of Europe, St-Jean-de-Losne, bashed some pegs in to a grassy bank, tied under the trees in the quiet, sat back relaxed, cool, and looking forward to a few days of catching up with friends.