A flawed reflection. Dun-sur-Meuse to Stenay

A couple of bridges that had not been repaired since they were destroyed in the first world war drifted past our windows today.  

We can relate to that time frame in a historical context and also to the war museums and  memorials that abound, they are within the historical parameters we have grown up with.   We know for instance that the oldest stone bridge in Australia was built in Richmond, Tasmania in 1825, the Port Arthur penal settlement closed for business in 1877.    The greater part of the history of European settlement in Australia has occurred within the lives of just three generations of my family..

Tonight we are in Stenay, the garrison town that was used by the Germans as their base for the attacks on Verdun. That was in a timeframe that makes sense to us, although when we saw what seems like a huge numbers of artifacts, helmets, bayonets, rifles and badges on sale at the local flea market that conflict of a century ago seemed almost in the present tense.

When we discovered that the town fortifications were dismantled in 1689 after a repositioning of the border between France and the Holy Roman Empire it was another matter.  That was before our time, and we were transported again into a zone outside that of our comprehension.  

Then we came across a description of a nearby fortification described thus: “Not old for the structures of this region, but worthy of note - Built in 1450”.  Even six hundred years isn’t old when you can track what was going on in the village a thousand years before that.

Our mind begins to boggle in a way that people born here don't understand, so we just carry on absorbing it by osmosis, enjoying the view.

Oh what a lovely bridge!

Sunday Lunch Consonvoye to Dun-Sur-Meuse

When we were in Toul, Paul had strongly recommended that we visit a particular restaurant in Dun-sur-Meuse.  

We were about a morning’s distance from the said village and therefore lunch when we woke this morning, and since we hadn’t actually made up our minds how far we were planning to go today, lunch seemed to be an obvious destination despite it being almost fifteen kilometres away.  If our sums were done correctly, we’d have to skip a stop for morning tea if we were to make it though, so we braced ourselves for a three hour, three lock marathon.   

There was no risk that any of the beige notions of familiarity expressed yesterday would be carried through today though, from the moment we cast off, the river was in one of those moods where the light was filtered through a subtle haze mooting the colours of the landscape so that they looked as though they’d been desaturated in photoshop or perhaps left to weather for millenniums.   

We discovered when we arrived that the village itself is postcard decrepit, intact but with a layer of wear thick enough to satisfy the harshest critic of urban renewal.  It’s stone church rises from the rocky crag above the town, posing rather than imposing.  Even those remnants of commercial activity the demise of which I was ruing only yesterday are scattered throughout the town, still sign written as they were decades or more ago.

After eating terrific Italian food cooked by an African chef for a Sicilian restaurant in a French village on the recommendation of a Dutch friend while on route to Belgium we can probably cease our quest for multi cultural adventure for a day or two at least.

Battling Complacency Vacherauville to Consenvoye

The day began neutrally enough in a beigey sort of fashion.  It was neither dull nor bright, not quite raining, cool, but not too cold and it would be tempting to say that that’s how it ended as well, in a beige little village.  It’s the sort of place that once housed a thriving rural community and perhaps it still does behind all those drawn curtains and shutters, but the baker has gone and the “corner store” and with it all other bits of commerce, victims of the way people want to shop in the twenty-first century; conveniently, in supermarkets with a large range of products just a short drive away, as opposed to the way we tourists would want them to shop in quaint little relics of a bygone time.

To describe it thus however would require a confession that we are becoming a little over-familiar with our surrounds, even a little blasé perhaps.  For instance we take for granted that we are moored in a little embranchment of the Meuse, alone, tied to a quay alongside a perfectly manicured park in crystal clear water that flows into and old mill race a few metres ahead.  If we open our eyes the village isn’t bland by any stretch, quite the opposite in fact, it’s pretty, with just the right amount of decay to enable us to read it’s history.     

At first we hardly noticed the church which has been there since before James Cook was born, with its bells sounding the dot of the hour then chiming incessantly (almost) as the twenty-first century bridal party gathered for its entrance.  

As we watched them arrive the familiarity that is the bane of all travellers crept in again, the inevitable comparison to home.  This was a scene we’ve been part of many times.  We could have been half a hemisphere away. The bride stood on the roadway, her dress dragging in the gravel to the concern of my own bride, her father oblivious, her mother fussing about with flowers.   Her uncle, his hair cut yesterday or perhaps by the look of it this morning with a slip of paper poking from the pocket of his old suit waited quietly, staying out of trouble.   Was the paper, we wondered, his speech already prepared, or the order of service from a funeral six years ago when last the suit was worn?    

We critique the bridesmaids, in frilly dresses that may or may not have been just a tad short to our eyes, in inverse proportion to the widths of their posteriors which in turn seemed to be directly related to the heights of their shoes.

The bagpipes heralded them in and out of our view and for a minute we had our cultural wires crossed, but they were the French kind, (the cabrette I think, blown by bellows).

By then we’d watched enough of the familiar, and wandered off to find another window to peer into.

The Bucket List Loses Another Line Bras-sur-Meuse

In the end we chose a spot down the road a bit from the refreshment station.  Actually it was down the road, over two bridges, through two-right angled turns and then round a curve up a bit of a rise; about two and a fraction minutes by racing bike, right where we thought we might see some riders discarding their bags. We made sure were there an hour before the “Caravan” was due.

The Caravan is a city festival parade on, if I may indulge in a bit of old cycling jargon, steroids.  Imagine a half-hour long parade of festival floats travelling at fifty kilometres per hour,  with one or more waving princess bolted to the structure in three or more point harnesses, madly trying to stay ahead of the even madder blokes on their bikes racing up behind,.  Simple mathematics says that this procession is twenty five kilometres long, but I digress.   To the above mix, add the princesses trained trinket throwers spraying valueless souvenirs of dubious manufacturing origin into the crowd as they go.   

There seems to be some sort of understanding that trinket hitting someone in the eye at that speed could take the edge of someone’s day, so the trinkets magically land at the feet of small children who have then only to wrestle their valueless prizes from the clutches of a certain foreigner of grandmotherly disposition, and a good time is had by all.

An hour later, in time for most of the trinkets to be broken or eaten, the wait was over.   

As I had hoped, predicted or just wished, meal bags were being discarded at precisely our location, (one was kindly discarded directly into my lap by a team Movistar legend, unwittingly fulfilling one of the saddest lifelong fantasies a person could have), riders were distributing packs among their team up and down the bunch, eating, sifting through their menus, swapping lunch notes, socialising, texting their mums and generally getting on with racing for another few hundred kilometres.   

Time may not have stood still, but it certainly slowed for a while.  We felt that we were actually a part of the event.  We felt as though we were there.

Afterwards, out of curiosity because my photographs also reinforce the illusion that time, and the riders are moving equally slowly, I checked their timestamps.  From the time I took the first shot of the approaching riders, until the last had passed, eighteen seconds had elapsed.  Eighteen seconds that felt like minutes.

Eighteen seconds, one hundred and eighty-six cyclists.

We may have waited three days for this, but it will be much longer than that before we actually understand what happened!

Preamble Vacherauville

Is there such a thing as a good spot to watch a bunch of cyclists tear past at forty or sixty kilometres per hour?   I suspect there is, and it is on a padded sofa in front of a large screen.   We don’t have a sofa or a screen, just a map of the route and the expected times of its whizzing by, so we wandered around the villages surrounding our mooring today, in reconnaissance mode rather than in the sightseeing one, trying to make a decision.

Charny-sur-Marne will be the first to see the riders, and it is a designated refreshment station.   That’s sort of like a pit stop in a formula one race, except that no-one stops.  The team “domestics” grab bags of sustenance held out by the ground crew as they race past, and ride through the pack to supply the front riders in their teams, who try to stay clear of the tangles which often ensue at the pickup point.   

It might be interesting to watch there, but it could be crowded and we might not see anything at all.  Perhaps if we wander down to the next village Bras-sur-Meuse, two minutes of racing further on, or even just a few kilometres up the first gentle climb towards the Bayonet Trenches of the war, we may see a little more as the front runners begin to climb.  

We walked along the route for seven kilometres today and could not decide where we will wait tomorrow.

With a day to go there a little last-minute cleaning of buildings and mowing of lawns is evident, but apart from the few signs warning of road closures, and some truckloads of barricades arriving in the villages there is no hint that tomorrow, for a few precious minutes the eyes of the world will be here.

We thought perhaps we may struggle to find a mooring within a reasonable distance of the route, but we are alone.

I suspect we won’t need to camp out to preserve our vantage spot, which given our indecision in that regard is no bad thing.

Touring at a snail's pace.

Lying in one’s bunk under a blanket, reading for most of the day while the rain lashes around the boat with the temperature feeling a lot lower than the mid teens the thermometer insisted that it was, gives plenty of time for contemplation.

We awoke with the urge to move that had been brewing since yesterday still with us.    To satiate that urge that we left Verdun this morning before the weather took its turn for the worse, with a few bits remaining to be seen, happy to have a reason to return at some future time. 

Now we are in a what appears to be the middle of nowhere, in a conservation reserve with mooring facilities built by the village of Vacherauville.  This happily, is located less than a kilometre from the route of a stage of the Tour de France in a few days’ time at a place where the Tour begins to wind its way up through the hills and the significant battlefields, graveyards and memorials surrounding Verdun.  This route has been planned as part of the first World War centenary commemorations, presumably to bring the world’s eyes to the region, and it will be interesting to see how vast commercial interests can convey their gratitude as the circus rolls past half a million graves.

The cyclists will cover two hundred and thirty-five kilometres on that day.  

Two hundred and thirty-five racing kilometres. They won’t be tucked up in bed reading if the weather turns a little iffy. They’ll just plug ever onwards at fifty kilometres per hour.

Embarrassingly in the face of that statistic, our own peregrinations have covered exactly one hundred fewer kilometres than that since leaving Lagarde three weeks ago.  One hundred kilometres fewer in three weeks than a bicycle race covers in one day.  

Today we travelled for eight kilometres and felt quite satisfied with that.

I wonder how many books those cyclists get through in a day.

Was it something we ate?

Something was having a deleterious effect on our respective bodily systems overnight, and we both woke feeling somewhat seedy with the rain coming down in torrents.

The manual for cruising says: “if you wake feeling somewhat seedy and the rain is coming down in torrents, roll over and sleep until things improve”.   It goes on to say; “and  even if things do improve there’s no point in pushing yourselves too hard, so just lie there for a couple of hours reading.

Never ones to dismiss instructions we did exactly that.   

The battlefield experience we had planned for today would be hard enough without the need to battle rain and cold and mud as well.  There is no sense in staging our own reenactment we thought.  It will have to wait till tomorrow.  Besides, it's tuesday and the forts are probably classified as Museums and won't be open for visitors anyway.

The cruising manual doesn't explain what makes one want to stay or want to go though.  While this morning we were happy to sit here a few more days, take the bus tomorrow and be tourists, despite the forecast being for weather no better than today, by the afternoon we were calmly ready to move on.    Not far, but on.

Tomorrow we will be travellers again.

Unless we change our minds overnight.