Living by numbers Revin

The day dawned full of optimism and prospect.   We were hardly out of bed when the first message arrived confirming what I had already discovered; the quest for the replacement part wasn’t going to be straight forward.   For some reason, out of all the parts in all the engines in the world, due to some sort of administrative error, or perhaps a misalignment of certain planets, this one little part, which has a reputation for breaking occasionally apparently, was never given a number.

Numbers mostly just hang around unnoticed, on walls, on doors, on sewer grates and telegraph poles and even banknotes.  We take them for granted, and it is only when some sort of emergency arises, such as when one is trying to order a machinery component to exactly replace another, that they become terribly important.    Eventually though, after a morning on computer and phone, we found a chap who knew a bloke who could get to someone in a far away land who would order the part for us, and all being well something will turn up in the mail by the end of the week.  Or the next.

Meanwhile in the port the numbers of Australians are steadily growing as well.   Richard and Gloria turned up out of the blue, and not unexpectedly we finally caught up with Ian and Lynda, or actually it was they who caught up with us two months and two countries later than we had planned.   

It was not a quiet evening, and for the second in succession the numbers of the clock were quite small when the lights finally went out aboard.

Sunday Revin

It would be fair to say that Mr Perkins' state of health is at top of mind if not causing stress, so a detailed search of the internet seemed like a reasonable way of filling in time until hopefully the answers to all the emailed cries for help start rolling in.

But after a couple of cups of coffee, having made only one confirmed sighting thus far part to match our broken one, and concluding that Michigan where the said part is currently located is a long way from Revin, and since no-one in Michigan seems to be prepared to answer their phone in the dead of night on a Sunday there seemed little point in doing anything further in that regard today.

Instead, we looked out the window and cleaned things, and wondered how the people in all those old houses looked out their own windows as they never actually seem to open the shutters.

During one of those looks out the window we couldn’t help but notice Tracy and Martin arriving in their narrow boat, and while it was mid afternoon when they did, suddenly, in the nicest possible way, all our plans for the afternoon and evening were suddenly in more disarray than those houses. 

Mr Perkins chose to ignore the ruckus and slept quietly in his box.

Cracks Revin

I was eating breakfast a few days ago when for the second time in as many years a corner of a tooth sheared off.   I guess that means my annual trip to the dentist will end in another crown job, but at least it can wait till we get back.

I found that Mr Perkins had the equivalent this morning while trying to discover the source of the fuel leak and his general crankiness of late. One of the flanges holding an injector into his head has cracked, after years of abuse.   “They” say it’s not something he ate, but that it can happen through being overtightened to fix a leak instead of spending thirty cents on a new washer - I suspect that a lot of thirty cents have been saved over the years on our Mr P.   and that they are going to add up to quite a lot of extra expenditure for the people at the end of the line.   If it wasn’t us left holding the baby, I’d rub my chin and try to look wise and tell them I would have told them so.

It is a bit disappointing at first being stranded forty kilometres from where we’ve paid a week’s rent in advance, but I suppose that if we have to be stuck anywhere, being stuck in a beautifully cared for Port with security, and Supermarkets, hardware stores and bakery a stone’s throw away is no terrible thing. 

It also means that we’ll be here on Monday so we be able to visit our friend Mary in the Tourist Office after all, and Monday is when the real logistical problem begins, when half a dozen parts suppliers return to work to put the weekends enquiries into their systems.   

Two I have spoken to today don’t know where to begin, but what happens if all the others send me one? 

it doesn’t matter, one replacement and five spares won’t come close to matching the cost of fixing the tooth.

Water under the bridge. Charleville-Meziers to Revin

Yesterday we were looking forward to spending a week just hanging around in Charleville-Mezieres.   We even paid our port fees nine days in advance, and were settling in, pulling out our lists of things to make and do, getting ready for Maggie and Jacques’ visit on the weekend.    Then the boat which was moored in the one piece of afternoon shade moved on, and we cast off our lines and fired up Mr Perkins intent on moving the hundred metres or so into that spare space.

That is when things went slightly awry.  For reasons that are not immediately self explanatory and probably not explicable at all, except that the day was hot and clear and the river was glistening and cool, we went straight past the marks where that other boat had been, onto the river for a bit.    The river in this part of the world, is particularly beautiful, lined with the cliffs and forests of the Ardennes, villages perched where they can, just appearing out of the forest.  At each turn some new vista would appear.  It's like travelling through a model railroad layout.

That is how it came to be that almost seven hours later we were in Revin, with no prospect of being home in time for tea, and the Captain of our new Port welcomed us as though we had been long lost , which in retrospect perhaps we had, and invited us to a party under her trees.  

There we met a lovely young lady who worked at the Tourist Office.  We told here idly that we didn’t really expect to be here today, and that tomorrow we’d come and see her in the office to find out what makes the town tick.   

She responded with a blank look and said “No, not tomorrow - we are closed.”

Of course.  Tomorrow is Saturday.  What was I thinking.  Everyone will be on the tourist train.

Finding Rambo Lumes to Charleville-Mezieres

We didn't get underway first thing, but managed to be in Charleville-Mezieres in time for morning tea none the less, in brilliant sunshine and a sky that reminded us of our other home; just made for washing apparently.   Accordingly we washed everything that needed washing and some things that didn’t and in the afternoon briefly dipped our toes into the waters of the town that was the home of Arthur Rimbaud (pronounced - you guessed it!), child prodigy, Symbolist poet and gun runner and who apparently once stabbed a photographer with a sword-cane during a poetry reading.    

The home town of the man for whom John Rambo was named has a museum dedicated to him (Rimbaud that is), and of course it’s famous and apparently quite interesting and worth the price of the admission, a must-see on the list of anyone visiting this city.

And it’s closed.

Not just closed on a Thursday either, or closed because we were here, we thought of that and booked for ten nights in port because it was the same price as five, more or less, and we thought we could wait out the places that usually close because they see us coming.   No, it’s closed for a year for renovations.   

Perhaps we won’t need ten days to see everything here after all.

Making some miles Mouzon to Lumes via Sedan

We have travelled more than one hundred and eighty kilometres since leaving Lagarde four weeks ago.  Today we accounted for twenty percent of those, and had a lunchtime stroll round Sedan to boot.

I suppose if we’d found Sedan to be in some way marvellous, we would have stayed for the night.  It was interesting enough certainly, modern in a nicely designed fifties and sixties sense, although a bit unloved compared to the cheery little villages we have been in all week.  The bread rolls we ate as we wandered were sensational, but there was nothing that compelled us to stay. 

We have visited enough forts for this week and we have decided that one can overdo forts as tourist destinations, just as one can overdo cathedrals.    

This is not to say the fort in Sedan would not have been interesting on another day though.  It has walls that are twenty metres thick, having been strengthened progressively as improvements were made to armaments through its history.  In retrospect, if one were to judge from the post-war age of the city outside the fort, either the effort that went into the walls was completely vindicated, or entirely wasted pending improvements to weapon accuracy.    On further meaningless history, I have no idea who Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne was, but he was born there apparently and just a few kilometres down the river underway again, we passed the town where Napolean and Bismark negotiated a surrender treaty surprisingly to those of us who imagine Napoleon living a very long time ago, to pretty much coincide with the winding down of Port Arthur as a penal settlement.

Unsure of how to illustrate any of this information in a new and informative way, I photographed a cat, and wondered if it would be better served with a ginger sauce, or mushroom.

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.