Where are we exactly?

We are here.   I know, we said that yesterday, but when we woke this morning we were really here, it wasn't just a dream, and by this afternoon it felt to both of us as though we had been here forever.   Can it be possible that we have contracted jet lag while travelling at eight kilometres per hour?

We've experienced this odd kind of dislocation deja-vu on other occasions too, and it's usually as was the case today, when we receive a visit from someone from our "previous life", an event which our brains find impossible to place in its correct context.  In downtown Paris, having lunch with Kerry,  and Vanessa, who now sounds so amazingly Dutch when she speaks that it's hard to believe she was once thirteen years old and washing dishes in the back of one of our stores, and Maarty who is the reason for her accent, was just one of those events.

The topics of our conversations are so familiar that our brains are telling us we are having them on the other side of the world.  We just can't explain the feeling of disorientation which goes on for the entire time they are aboard, except for every now and then as a tour boat glides past our window when we are brought back to Paris again.

They left to catch their train to Amsterdam, we had a snooze, and when we woke were are again in the right hemisphere, the one where our internet connection doesn't work as it should except when we go into the provider's shop to demonstrate our problem.  The shop where the nice young man smiles and shakes our hand as we leave, delighted to have been no help at all.

Paris!

We broke our cardinal rule this morning leaving the comfort of our bed when everything was in single digits, time and temperature.  We were on a mission, we had places to go.

I'm sure if Lars and Britt in the yacht behind us had actually heard Mr P splutter into life, they would have rolled over from their slumber with one half opened eye out of the window and seeing what they thought was fog, returned to their repose without further ado.    In front of our fog machine though, a glorious clear day was beckoning, and through good luck, animal cunning  and the kindness of a large peniche captain who arranged himself in the lock to fit us in, our timing was so perfect that the last lock brought us onto the Seine and central Paris just one hundred and fifty seconds before its lunch-o'clock close.

Half an hour later we were moored in our new home for almost the next month, fifteen boats from the Arsenal Metro Station, close to the heart of Paris.  The monument at the Bastille looms large in our sky.

Our emotions are a little taxed for no reason.  We feel as though we have completed some sort of major journey, when the reality is that we have done no more than having taken a long, comfortable drive through the countryside. 

It matters not, we are here, watching Parisians worshipping the sun and the clear blue sky, watching us watching them.  

Photographing us photographing them.

We are in Paris, but we have brought our home with us.  We don't feel like tourists this time, perhaps that is what we are coming to terms with!

As we slid slowly along to the tune of Mr P's dulcet tones, in what would otherwise have been the stillness of the  early afternoon except for the odd sixty kilometre per hour gust of wind to keep us on our toes, with variable thirty to forty at other times, we remarked to each other how quickly we'd resumed our old cruising pattern.

The frenzied travel mode has once again given way to wander round the market after breakfast, elevensies at ten, something else at eleven, an early departure followed by a very civilised seven kilometre an hour pace for a few hours, with a stop for lunch under some trees in the country somewhere. By half-past two we had done enough to catch up on some sleep we may have missed between breakfast and lunch and after that, a bit of a walk around the new village nicely rounded off the day thanks very much.

Then we thought about last night and our spot in Meaux and the sunset over the cathedral and the things there that we didn't see and almost felt guilty, quickly assuaging that by resolving to go back one day for a longer stay.

We don't really care though, because tonight we are less than twenty kilometres, three locks and a tunnel  from our destination.

Tomorrow, if the sun is shining, we may even roll into town with the roof back and then we'll know that summer has arrived.

The Sleigh Ride Continues! 60 kilometres!-Nanteuil-sur-Marne to Meaux

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?

Slow down we're going too fast! Dormans to Nanteuil-sur-Marne

By the time we had walked up the hill and poked around a bit, the supermarket was open for business, so just in case we become marooned on a desert island between here and Paris which is now but a breath more than one hundred kilometres distant, we dropped in for among other things, ten spare electric toothbrush heads, three bottles of injector cleaner, some bedwetting pads for Mr Perkins, a dish drying rack, and some bananas.

This delay meant that we were barely back at base before ten, the magic hour when civilised cruising people are but beginning to stir from their slumber, which enabled us to say a "proper" farewell to Eric and Linda before once again taking our place on the monster waterslide to Paris.

Admittedly the excitement of travelling at what we think is near breakneck speed is tempered a teensy bit when we actually look at the figure blinking at us on the GPS, but today even after being held up for an hour while police divers tried to locate a sunken car, we managed to travel an incredible best ever, personal unlikely to be repeated record of fifty kilometres, at an average speed of more then eight per hour!

When we berthed this evening, we checked our schedule, and realised that today we had consumed three days of it!   We may never again travel fifty kilometres or drive for six hours consecutively, but the moment it seems easier to keep going than to try to stop somewhere in the near rapids, which for some inexplicable reason seem to accelerate near every dock in every village.     

All that aside, we can hear the sirens of the city beckoning, luring us to their wails, so who knows what tomorrow may bring.

No worries! -Mareuil-sur-Ay to Dormans

"No no no no no no no no" replied the lock keeper when I asked if there was a possibility that we'd have a problem on the river today.

Eight "noes" seemed reasonably emphatic, but just to be sure I asked him what speed he thought the river was running at; three, four kilometres per hour perhaps?    He shook his hand in that sort of wobbly rocking motion that that means "approximately" and said four, five, but there is not a problem.

Hmmm, five.   That's getting very close to being a problem, but not quite, so we swallowed hard and called out something in French that we hope meant "bewdy mate well get on with it then", and he pressed the button which dropped us the last two metres down to the river level. 

The water wasn't overly terrifying, although it was hardly pretty with it's flood-pus colour and the swirls and eddies made it look much worse than it really was.  I hate to draw these sorts of comparisons, but really it wasn't unlike the upper reaches of the Brisbane River on an outgoing tide.

Revelling in our new found ability to travel at a river speed limit in double figures, and that with the engine barely ticking over, we would have arrived well before lunch if we had left sometime before morning tea, but we hadn't.   We were early enough though to be mid pre-mid afternoon snooze when the only other boat on the river today arrived and moored behind us.  After Linda and Eric introduced themselves we knew that mid afternoon and late afternoon snoozes were not going eventuate either and if we didn't exercise a good deal of discretion perhaps our late evening one may be greatly impaired as well.  

They've just been where we are going and we've just been where they are going, and even if we hadn't had eleventy-three mutual friends there were many notes to swap and that all takes time.

We chatted for so long that the lights went out in the sky, and came on on the church spire and the flood level of the river dropped by almost fifty millimetres. 

The lock keeper, as usual was right.  Today, there was not a problem.

The day we went to Epernay

We stood silently on the big round-about with the memorial at it's centre in Epernay, among a crowd so small you could almost count its number on the fingers of one thumb, listening as the music from what was clearly the second-best band in the district slowly gathered in volume as it approached.   

The old soldier stood with a woman and her children who may have been his great-grandchildren, silently waiting.

As the first of the police escort marched into the street, stood to attention, and quietly joined the parade for it's circuit of the roundabout, clearly any greater distance would have stretched the limits of his stamina, standing once more to attention while the brief remembrance ceremony formalities were complete.

The party today, wasn't exactly in our honour it turns out.  

Today is a public holiday celebrating VE day, the anniversary of what is known as Victory in Europe day, and clearly one of remembrance for the fallen in that conflict.

Fewer than a hundred metres up the road more speeches were conducted, but since that was happening precisely opposite the House of Moët and Chandon, where as it happens on a completely unrelated, but distinctly more musical note than that produced by the band, the Ferrari Club of Romania had gathered for an outing.  We excused ourselves silently and turned to tour through some of Moët's twenty-eight kilometres of underground champagne cellar, which fortunately we were able to complete in time to partake of a rather satisfactory public holiday luncheon.

Returning to Mareuil-sur-Ay we were relieved to find that the accordion player had been accidentally booked elsewhere for the day, probably filling in on cymbals in the Epernay band, and the loudspeakers which had been strung among the trees, each pointing exactly in our direction were were gently drizzling out some very mellow jazz with the odd track thrown in from an unknown "greatest hits on the Hammond Organ" album.   

The flower market, itself equally mellow, slowly melted away as the colour of the sky turned into a different sort of drizzle in the fading daylight.  

By then Grahame and Aileen should have arrived at the next stop on their JetLag journey, and a very Sunday feeling Tuesday turned into a perfectly still and silent evening on the Canal Latéral à la Marne.