Reflections - Void to Demange-aux-Eaux

As we watched the calm come over the port last night it was hard to believe that just hours before we had seen sixty kilometre winds below the footbridge.

The calm remained with us today as we climbed the rest of the mountain.  Jean-Wolf, the owner of the barge we had been following for the past few days kindly allowed us through the Mauvages tunnel ahead of him as in theory we could travel much faster than he, and we could perhaps gain a lock or two's distance in the course of the afternoon.

With the tow barge inoperable, as the first boat through we again had the glorious experience of five kilometres of perfect tunnel reflections.  For almost an hour we had our optical senses attacked as we seemed to be simply floating through space.  It is hard to believe how difficult it is to maintain a straight course in the presence of such a strong illusion.

Strangely, at the other end of the tunnel, the first lock on the downhill run was unmanned, and closed with the intercom turned off for good measure.   After several hours we were able to summon some assistance from a bemused executive who wasn't quite sure why anyone would want to be navigating anywhere the day before May the first, when everything would be closed anyway.   After explaining that we thought a nice little village a few kilometres down the track would have been a great place to stay, we apparently mutually decided that perhaps the mooring below the lock would be better, and there was room for Jean-Wolf above it should he also very wisely decide not to continue with his journey.

So here we remain, near Demange-aux-Eaux for the next twenty four hours, a place that is so quiet it makes the harbour in Void last night look like a beach resort in high season.

Oh darn, we're stuck in the middle of nowhere, rural France.

What ever shall we do?

Moving on relentlessly - Toul to Void

We are nothing at the moment, if not determined to get through the tunnel at the top of the hill, from which it will be a gentle run through the Champagne region, to Paris.  With that in mind we actually rose in time to buy the day's baguettes, had Mr P clearing the port of all flying insect pests and were ready to leave on the stroke of nine this morning.

However, a few strokes before then, the nice Danish man in the yacht in the next mooring wandered over to the lock gates to wait for the light to change to green.   It's no fun sharing a chain of locks in an uphill direction with a yacht whose shape is distinctly not parallel to the sides of the wall, they tend to bang and flail and their mast stowed overhanging the hull can get quite threatening to anyone else trying to sit quietly in the washing machine with them, so we thought we'd wait a bit.    An hour actually, we decided we'd wait an hour.

Which as it turns out, is exactly how long it took for the monster barge to arrive as it did, just as we were about to leave.   This for those who don't know, meant a fairly lengthy wait at each of the next ten locks, in winds increasing to the point where the "fun" flags were definitely coming down, but like the old sea dogs we aren't, we persevered, wondering how many people in the world right now had the opportunity to visit a new waterfall every thirty minutes or so.   

Berthed tonight after four days of serious travel, we are trying to gain some perspective on the hectic pace of our journey thus far.  In four days we have passed thirty-eight villages, towns and settlements,  we have negotiated thirty-six locks and we have travelled a total of one hundred and seven kilometres.

That's the bit we really find hard to put into perspective.

In four days travelling at what we consider to be a completely uncivilised pace, we have managed to travel exactly eight kilometres more than the distance from our house at Dicky Beach to the Brisbane International Airport.  If we were on our way to visit our kids south of Brisbane, we'd be there by Tuesday.

A day on the river - Champigneulles to Toul

If we were to make real progress on our Parisian quest, we thought perhaps we should be at the first lock at opening time.  That's nine am, and most would agree a time better reserved for lying warm under a doona.  The promise of a warm day and a temperature already in double figures did spur us on though, and when we got underway we only missed our self imposed deadline by fifteen minutes or so, which we thought wasn't bad even if it did take a couple of cups of coffee to get us there.

Because this is France, the friendly lock keeper we were relying on to make it all work seemed to have adopted a much more sensible approach to starting his day, and we waited for almost an hour for him to press the button which would allow us to take the ride down that last four metres or so to the Moselle.  I suspect that the effort of having to get to the office at seven to let the barge through may have taken a lot out of him.

The freedom of the big river and it's twelve kilometre per hour speed limit can apparently be a "let the hair down moment" in craft that are differently configured.  For us it is wonderful to be on what seems to be an infinitely wide waterway if not particularly liberating in the velocity stakes. 

In theory we'd be able to push poor Joyeux to that sort of speed if Mr P were a little younger perhaps and perhaps not quite so many kilograms of groceries were on board.   Theory and practice collide brutally on the river, and well we remember last year, making what we considered to be good progress only to have Paul and Bertha pull alongside to see if there was anything wrong.  This year, with Mr P wound out to a dizzying eighteen hundred revolutions per minute, we managed to average better than eight kilometres per hour against two of current, which we thought was quite impressive really.

I'm not sure if it was the noise or the smell of the diesel or just that normally we'd take two days to travel this far, but by the time we arrived in Toul, another of our favourite cities, it was mid afternoon and we were ready once more for a stop.    

One day later Somerviller - Champigneulles

 We thought we'd push it hard today, get a few miles under the bottom and all that, so we were up at the crack of nine, in what was almost brilliant sunshine, and even more brilliantly, with barely a few kilometres travelled, spring turned up for an hour or so and what a difference that made to the world!

The forecast did suggest that this little spurt of sunshine was but an omen for what may happen in a day or two's time and that getting excited about it might not be an appropriate behaviour, but we took what of it there was to take and happily smoked off into the morning, ready to provision the ship at our favourite provisioning spot, on the outskirts of Nancy.

We really love that place, Nancy that is, not mooring along the back wall of the supermarket smelling more than ever of beer processed through kidneys, and we felt super guilty as we passed by the harbour trying not to take so much as a sideways glance.  For the first time in three years, we have passed Nancy without spending a few days or even a week poking around it's squares and alleys, but we are determined to keep trucking on.

A little further down the waterway, there is a harbour with pontoons that are covered by ducks.  It's a place called Champignuelles and it would have won me a sheep station last year if Jacques had one to bet.  That Jacques of "travelled every waterway in France and live just a bit up this one fame", like every other boat person in France it seems, did not know of the existence of this little harbour, despite it actually existing on the main channel a mere six kilometres from Nancy.    

We like to stay there too, because it's free and very close to all sorts of facilities, and when we are people possessed with the urge to travel as fast as we are, it gives us a real head start to the main lock dropping us onto the Moselle, and our first gateway to what lies in the West.

So after another arduous day at the helm and our larder filled with supplies that will last until the next supermarket, err… tomorrow, we are able to tick off another twenty or so kilometres in the log.

Springing into action. Lagarde - Sommerviller

What  is supposed to be spring to our untrained eye still looks a bit like winter, only with grass, it feels like winter too, to us at least.  We are assured that when the time comes the leaves will begin to move, the flowers will bud and the world around us will change.

When the time comes for a change, it just arrives without warning for us too, as it did when we woke this morning.  Suddenly the tasks that yesterday were necessary to have complete before departure, were no longer important.   The only thing that matters when that feeling is upon us is being underway, so as yet unfitted fenders were lashed to the roof waiting for another day, and before he could do anything to resist we were poking the geriatric Mr Perkins in the ribs, trying to rouse him from his slumber.

He remains quite cantankerous but the wiring renovations completed last year have taken the sting out of his starting argument at least.  The love that Bill lavished on him over winter has left him with a much greater ration of oil than we would normally allow, and like a fat old Labrador, he's gulping it as though there will be no tomorrow,  but apart from the odd hiccough he grumbles away all day pushing us along at our usual walking pace.

Five hours at six kilometres per hour and nine locks further down the canal we are moored, alone in the countryside and we are on our way.  Life just looks different somehow.

We have another hundred and sixty or so locks to pass before we reach Paris, and are just happy to be on the move, although it must be said that we were just as happy sitting still not twenty four hours ago.

It's rain, Jim, but not as we know it- Lagarde

The weather forecasting device I prefer provides mostly a graphic readout.  For days it has had two little golden balls representing sunshine beginning the day after tomorrow.    It has become something of a ritual for me to log on each morning and smile as I watch them both jump one further day into the future.

Today however, while they did jump as expected, now promising fine weather on Friday and Saturday, they seemed to be caught somewhat unawares by the immutable fact that this morning we woke with the boat and for that matter the entire port and even the village beyond, bathed in luxuriant sunshine.

This it seemed was a sign that perhaps at long last I could get the windows back where they needed to be, and finish all the outside jobs that should have been completed on the day that we arrived.   There seemed little point in wasting time, so we bounced out of bed well before ten, had a leisurely breakfast and an even more leisurely cup of coffee while sitting in the aforementioned sunshine.  Then, as the weather was so pleasant, we wandered up to the lock to see Monika and Jim safely on their merry way and returned just in time for the cloud to start building along with the wind, making conditions terribly unpleasant for working, let alone working outside.

But a man has to do what a man has to do, and by the time the first few drops of rain had fallen, it was lunch time, but the windows were finally reinstalled.   The next day or two will be nervous ones, waiting and watching after every squall to see if any errant drop finds its way through the fresh sealant.   We've also replenished our gas, filled the watertanks, replaced the waterpump which we replaced yesterday and have generally stowed pretty much everything ready to get underway.

There are a few odd jobs remaining, but they can be done at any time, we have no excuses, we may move on soon.

For now though, we are just happy sitting watching the rain on the OUTSIDE of the windows.

If we take the photo in the late evening, the sky looks blue! - Lagarde

The German tourist would have been, if I were any judge of character at all, typical of his ilk.

He wore a black ski suit (or what I take to be a ski suit but may just be fashionable "walk to the marina" wear), stocky of build tending towards too portly for his loose fitting tights and topped by what would have been a head of grey hair had it not been shaved a few days or perhaps a week ago.  Had he been sporting a pair of white shoes and a heavy gold bracelet or a signet ring with a Mercedes badge on it, the picture in my mind would have been complete and I may have thought I was back at Marina Mirage.

There was a sort of confident rather than arrogant air about him, as he wandered quietly down to the end of the pontoon where I was intent one more time on not completing the reglazing of the front window.  I didn't ignore him, but I didn't look up either until the inquiry came, in an accent which I barely understood.

"Parlez vous Anglais?". Nothing in that question or the manner in which it was asked meshed in any way with the view of this fellow that I'd already formed.

"Enough to make myself understood," I replied in my most laconic tone, with perhaps a dash of whimsy thrown in.

"Ochhh dar's greet" he in turn responded, in a most un-Teutonic way and then proceeded to enquire very politely if it was OK for him to berth his hire boat in front of us.

Jim it turns out, speaks German without any hint of his native Scottish brogue.  A Scotsman called JIm, can you imagine it?  The ski suit, usually worn by tourists as some sort of affectation, is apparently actually the most convenient way for a Scottish Ski instructor from an Austrian resort who lives in Germany, to keep warm and dry when he's hiring a boat in France.   

 His wife Monika who is German but uses the bits of his accent that he no longer needs when she speaks English, rues the way her once Oxford tongue began to dissolve from the day that she met him. 

Who needs windows in a boat when there are two more delightfully colourful lifetimes to find out about and only one night to do it in!