Legends from our own lunchtimes

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

On becoming history bores.
Stenay to Mouzon


We turned a corner on the river today and the wooded hills were rising suddenly not far from us from the fields which were doing a fair impression of alluvial plains.  If the crops had been sugar cane instead of corn we might for an instance have been excused for thinking we were on the Tweed River.   

Taking this to be a sign that we needed a coffee, we stopped for morning tea, and while we were at it we stopped for the rest of the day as well to ensure we didn’t overdo things.  As we’d never been to a Felt Museum before and it just happened that the one in this very village was open, we thought that a post-lunch visit to that would make for some light relief from all the tales of war we had been enduring of late.

We would have been absolutely correct on that score had it not been for having to walk through the last of the standing “Town Gates” on our way.  Built sometime a very very long time ago, the towns fortifications notably held back “the Spaniards” in a siege that lasted forty days some time in the 1600’s, although the plaque didn’t say what the score was at the end, or who in fact won.  I can only presume that the absence of paella cafe’s in the winding streets meant that those pesky Spaniards popped off to play somewhere further north instead.  

Knowledge is useless though if it isn’t shared, and when we were invited to drinks which turned into a lengthy dinner with the owners of the two British barges in port, perhaps they weren’t quite expecting that by the end of the night they would be as knowledgeable as we.  I am fairly certain that they we sad to see us (eventually) leave as well, even though we hadn’t quite quite got to the point of asking questions to see if they had been listening.
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