Thinking locally. Sunday 17 June - Pagny-sur-Marne to Eauville

We are trying to limit our travels for the next period of time, to one page of our chart book per day.  This equates to travelling something less than ten kilometres, which can prove quite useful  in the event of discovering when we arrive at our destination that we have left something behind, as we can simply walk back to get it.

There are those we are aware, who do not share our propensity for travelling slowly.  The world is their oyster, why bother with the intricacies of the large scale chart when a globe will do.

Euville is why, and dozens, perhaps hundreds of other little places like it.  They are as far as one can be off the beaten path, when the beaten path is actually a waterway.   None the less, those who don’t take the time will never know what they miss as they storm past us wondering what we see in the tranquility and the quaintness of it all.  The answer is clear, there is nothing to see here (that we want to share at any rate), move along and leave us to it!

Out of the gate Saturday 16 June -Toul to Pagny-sur-Marne

The farewell hugs and kisses took a while, and a casual observer could all be forgiven for thinking we were heading off on a journey of something more than the twelve locks and thirteen kilometres that the day would bring.  

Popping through the little tunnel at the top of it all we both felt we were going through some sort of a gateway to new adventures. This was a nonsense of course.  It will be weeks or even months before we are beating a path not travelled before, but our minds have now happily farewelled the most familiar of our stomping grounds and we feel that are finally on our way.

Having traversed almost a hundred kilometres in the past two weeks,  perhaps now we can slow down to a less blistering, more cruising kind of pace.

Bio Diversity Friday 15 June - Toul

Some years ago the local authority in Toul began an experiment on the town’s ramparts.  Some bright spark had decided that for the cost of a few signs proclaiming that they had been declared a nature zone encouraging a bio-diverse range of plant species, they would never have to mow the grassy banks again.   Thus far the experiment seems to be working famously in a rugged wilderness kind of way and it’s curious to see that sheep have now been introduced  to variously trample, eat or ignore bits of vegetation and perhaps to introduce flies and dung beetles adding still more biodiversity to the experiment.

We had a little more bio added to the diversity in our own troupe this morning.  Ele decided that despite waking with no symptoms of his lingering malady, it was time for her Australian friend to visit a French doctor.  There is no argument that can be won when Ele decides something, and in due course we arrived, one of us with an ear just a little reddened from being dragged by it, to a nearby surgery, where the lovely doctor checked all vital signs and a few non vital ones and declared all to be in order.  “Perhaps we must assume it is a veerooce,” she declared to the relief of her reluctant patient.

So it came to pass that in the still of the late evening our ecosystem had had expanded to include a boatload of Australians (some heavily jetlagged), some Germans and an unidentified veerooce singing Irish folk songs in an ancient French city.

A bit of housekeeping Thursday 14 June - Toul

Curiously while one of us continued to lay progressively less low yet none the less still laying, in the clutches of whatever evil bug lurked within his system.  The other seemed injected with all the energy he did excess energy, cleaning, polishing and washing all within the boat to within an inch of it’s life.  Had there been a chimney stack on board, he would not have been surprised on rising from his morning nap to find a next of twigs being constructed on it, such was the intensity of her on board activity.

Instead, he woke to find Joan and Peter had arrived, looking the way people do when their bodies have arrived that very morning from Australia, and their consciousness is still awaiting air traffic control clearance to land.  Not quite alive enough to start the post-winter clean of their boat, it seemed only logical that they should come aboard with all their news.  

Jürgen and Ele arrived in port not long after from an entirely different direction and the stage was set for a long and happy afternoon, made happier for some with the knowledge that even under overcast skies the washing was dry!

Looking forward, looking back. Wednesday 13June - Toul

I used to go to some trouble to eliminate cars from photos involving otherwise quaint little cobbled streets and ancient buildings.  There was something intrusive about their presence that somehow conflicted with the ambience that the ancient streetscapes conjured in my mind.  Despite rumours to the contrary, the absence in that perfect world of chamber pots of sewage being thrown from upper story windows and mounds of festering horse manure on the streets should provide evidence that beyond this cool hard exterior their lurks just a teensy glimmer of a true romantic  

The reality is that cars are omnipresent, a fact of life in the present and therefore it’s probably just as important to occasionally record their place in our time, just as the inclusion of a horse or a goat or a leper perhaps might have been amusing to future generations had this photo been taken a century ago.  It’s interesting to note the age of the vehicles in question and sobering to reflect on the pace of change.  In one fell swoop of legislation and incentive, vehicles beyond a certain have gone, the battered colour of 2CV’s and Renaults which seemed to add to their surrounds are gone, replaced by shiny dark bubbles which belch far less pollutant.  Except that there are more of them, so they don’t.

In just one more decade the internal combustion engines that power them will no longer be allowed in inner city streets. In two decades they will have disappeared altogether.   When that happens, remember this photo and look back at them fondly, these dinosaurs of transportation waiting to become fossils, as you would those relics from our present past.  

Watching You. Tuesday 12 June - Toul

The cathedral in Toul is a ginormous thing completely out of scale with the rest of the town, which by virtue of a curious dichotomy actually makes it completely in scale. 

One would think with streets that are not at all straight yet terribly narrow that it could never be seen from within the town itself, and if one thought that, one would be wrong.  Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians it has an uncanny ability to peek down the smallest of alleyway, no doubt curious about what is going on, as though ready to admonish any doer of evil.  

In other places, just as one thinks one has achieved respite from its steady gaze, one rounds a bend and it sort of leaps out and shouts silently “Aha!”.

It’s quite possibly a thousand year old version of a video surveillance camera, you never know if it’s really watching, or if it is, whether all will be on tape for future review.  Quite possibly the best approach is to do no wrong, just in case.   

Then The Rains Came Again. Monday 11 June - Toul

While the mystery malady may have been “better” yesterday, it was “worse” today, although “not as bad” as the day before.  There seemed little reason therefore not to malinger.

Then the rains came again, and having no need nor being in any mood to spend any time outside, we simply called a lay day.  

For the second time in three days we confined ourselves to barracks.  Luckily for us there’s a very, very good bakery just across the road and we can have no qualms at all in considering it to be part of our barracks complex!