Our 11-day holiday

I (J) have always wanted to go on a cruise and tomorrow evening, (it is Tuesday 24th as I type) all going according to plan, we will board a ship in Marseille called Orient Queen and start a cruise in the Mediterranean, which promises to be interesting. The itinerary is below. The decision to go on a cruise was easy to make we found it on a nautical version of wotif.com, at a very competitive price.


Because I tend to be anxious about departure times, we have just returned from timing the walk the Railway Station. It took 20 minutes, so we will leave at 6:30am to be sure to catch the 7:10 train to Marseille, via Dijon. The heavens opened while we were doing this little bit of research so we are somewhat damp. Thank goodness for electricity and a heater! It is not cold but there is a bit of drying out to be done before we leave. This evening we will have to securely position a tarpaulin to keep the boat dry while we are away. We can cope with a couple of irritating leaks while we are on board by using towels but it’s not so flash when we are away from the boat completely. C is making enquiries about getting all the boat windows professionally removed and resealed. She has valiantly tried to solve the problem but we have decided to get the job done by experts, although we know it will be expensive…and what’s more, people seem quite reluctant to take it on.

We will be interested to see if the cruise will be even close to what we imagine it to be. By and large, we agree that we are looking forward to the experience of being on a ship. We hope there will be some opportunities to swim in fabulous places. We will enjoy not being the ones making decisions and doing the work. We will also enjoy visiting the ports of call and having a good look around but do not intend to frenetically visit all advertised ‘must see’ spots.

Watch this space for our reaction!


Wednesday, August 25: Train to from Besançon to Marseille; boat leaves at 19:00
Thursday, August 26: Cruising
Friday, August 27: Messina, Sicily
Saturday, August 28: Kotor, Montenegro
Sunday, August 29: Split, Croatia
Monday 30 August: Venice, Italy
Tuesday 31 August: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Wednesday 1 Sept: Corfu, Greece
Thursday 2 Sept: Lipari, an island off the coast of Sicily
Friday 3 Sept: Civitavecchia - Rome
Saturday 4 Sept: Marseille, then train back to Besançon – late at night

Marking time

We mentioned in a previous blog post that L’Isle-sur-le-Doubs was a really good place for us to stay and we always planned to spend a few days here on the way back down the canal. There are always small (and large) jobs to do on the boat and we need to fill in time so we don’t get back to Besançon too soon. We have arranged to leave the boat there from August 25 to Sept 4 while we go off on a cruise around the Mediterranean (I realise we haven’t mentioned this in our blog yet and will have to give more details before too long). While Besançon has a good, safe port to leave the boat, it can be noisy, especially at weekends, so we don’t want to arrive before Sunday.

It is just as well we planned things that way, for fate would have contrived to have us here at L’Isle sur le Doubs anyway. We arrived on Friday afternoon, did the washing and some grocery shopping on Saturday, and then the (predicted) rain started. It was very heavy, constant rain throughout the night and the following morning. It abated a little on Sunday afternoon before settling in again in the evening and continuing right through Monday and intermittently through the night. The temperature plummeted to around a daytime maximum of 17 or 18 degrees but that didn’t take into account the wind-and-rain chill factor. You may remember that the last time we were here, it was 32 degrees at 9pm and we had to swim in the river to cool down. No such thoughts have entered our heads this time, believe me, especially when we look at the river…


Although, as its name suggests, the L’Isle sur le Doubs (The Island on the Doubs) is situated on the Doubs river, the port is on the canal, just before we meet the navigable part of the river. Everyone has told us that the Doubs (pronounced the same way as “doux”, the French word for mild, gentle or sweet) can be a capricious river – quick to rise in the rain and quick to settle back down again when it stops. We have now seen for ourselves the truth of the first half of this statement. The gentle, clear river of a few weeks ago is now seriously swollen, fast-moving and mud-brown. Not only is swimming out of the question at the moment but the VNF has closed the river/canal to navigation and we have no idea when it will be opened again. We’re now stuck here, whether we like it or not.


We’ve passed the time doing some of the jobs we planned – laid some vinyl in the kitchen, done some repairs to the laminated area around the fridge, cleaned out and organised the hatches at the back of the boat. Cooking and eating Sunday lunch took up a fair bit of time: red pepper soup, Montbeliard sausage with fried potato and salad, nectarine clafoutis washed down with a bottle of rosé… and then a little siesta. Managing the leaks around the windows also takes time – and we have finally given in and decided we need a professional to do that job. We’ve talked to Blanquart’s in St-Jean-de-Losne but are investigating a Besançon outfit as well.

Yesterday, despite the rain and cold, we ventured out to the supermarket and the once-a-month street market, then treated ourselves to a coffee and a stay in a warm café beside the market place. Some of the patrons were mildly amused to watch us towel off (we’re in shorts with long waterproof jackets to minimize wet clothes), take off sandals and replace them with thick socks for warmth before settling down to our coffee and a game of cards. We spent a very pleasant hour or so there before heading back to the boat for lunch, jobs, reading, cards and cryptic crosswords.

This morning (Tuesday) the rain has stopped and the temperature risen a little. We’ve been down to look at the river without getting soaked and it seems to have dropped a little. We’ve given ourselves a couple of reference points and will return later in the day to see if the drop in water level is obvious. Whatever is the case, we don’t expect to be away from here before Thursday and more probably Friday.



As is the case in many of the places we stop, the passing of time is marked by the chiming of one or more clocks on public buildings. Here the town hall clock marks each quarter of an hour and is joined by the church clock ringing out the hours. The normal ring of the town hall clock consists of two chimes in rising tones for each quarter of an hour with a small pause between each pair. However, every now and again, with no discernible pattern as far as we can tell, there is a third rogue chime on the end of a pair. It never seems to occur when we stop and really listen to the chimes, only as a kind of awareness of something slightly out of place. We’ve become quite captivated by this rogue chime, which sends us the message that slight eccentricities or flaws can sometimes be more charming than perfection.

PS It's just after 5pm as I'm posting this. The Doubs has neither risen nor fallen during the day and the town hall clock rang a perfect set of four pairs of chimes to mark the hour as I passed it on my way to the camping ground.

On top of the world…

It’s early August… As I type those words, my computer fills in the blank of the date and tells me it’s the ninth. I know it’s a Monday – we had Sunday lunch yesterday. We are moored at the small port of Montreux-Château just above a lock and we’ve been here since Friday afternoon.. At first (and even subsequent glances), for the traveler arriving by road, there doesn’t appear to be anything special about Montreux-Château. Apart from the port and the camper van park nearby, there is a small village with a small but surprisingly good supermarket, a town hall, an ugly, modern (closed) church and a lavoir. The French would call a place lke this “un bled”; we’d call it “a hole” in the back of beyond. While indisputably true, that description on its own would not be doing the place justice. The amazing display of flowers, presumably planted by the French version of the local council, is absolutely stunnung. They are carefully tended daily and maintain their glory seemingly for the whole summer.

In navigating terms, this is a very special place indeed – it is the high point of the Rhone to Rhine Canal, which means that from here we could sail downstream either all the way to the Mediterranean Sea (via half of the canal, the Saone and the Rhone) or all the way to the North Sea (via the other half of the canal and the mighty Rhine). We are also on the regional border of Alsace and Franche-Comté. The way down onto the Alsatian plains is via a spectacular staircase of locks. You meet 12 of them in the space of just two and a half kilometres! Stunning. On the Franche- Comté side, the descent is much gentler. There are some 73 locks and 185 km back down to the confluence with the Saone (3km north of St-Jean-de-Losne)…and all of it downstream! We’ve no doubt mentioned before that locking down is so much easier than locking up, so the prospect of what is to come is particularly sweet!


The port here is also particularly lovely. Like many along the canals, the port (including the lock and the bridge) is a riot of petunias, geraniums, alyssum and begonias. It’s a pure delight. The “port” has a beautiful (new?) wooden quay with space for 4 boats and good edges all around for those who don’t fit on the quay. You only pay if you want water and electricity – a 5 euro token will get you 24 hours worth of both. We’ll spend 4 days here and it will only cost us 5 euros in all. For that, we’ll have filled the boat with water, charged up all our electrical appliances, done the washing, the ironing (don’t ask!) and the vacuuming, run the fridge on electricity (rather than gas) for 24 hours and had a couple of solar showers… We can’t complain about that for value!


The other thing that has made this a particularly memorable place for us is that we have had a couple of delightful encounters and reunions. We spent our first evening here having drinks with Swiss people, Lucie and Peti, who we’d been sharing locks with all day (going up that staircase mentioned in the first paragraph). On our second day, we went out to take the ropes for some people coming in to moor only to find they were Annick and Jean-Marie off Lilly Boyd, a Belgian boat we’d encountered in our first year. in port at Pouilly, at the top of the Canal de Bourgogne, Jean-Marie couldn’t bear watching us taking our jerry cans to the supermarket for diesel and insisted on taking us there in his car even though we’d never met. We thanked him with a batch of scones, which obviously impressed them both as there’s a photo of them in their journal for that year. (they don’t have an oven on their boat so scones were a treat for them) We had a lovely evening together here on our boat, which gave us the opportunity to get to know the two of them better – and to exchange photos of each other’s boats from 2008, which neither of us knew the other had taken. That was fun! In an almost exact repeat of events on the third day, we went out to help only to find Déesse in the lock, captained by Peter, who we’d met earlier this year in Dole and had drinks with in Besançon. At that time, he was accompanied by a friend, Derek, but now he has his partner, Jean, with him… There followed another catch up although this time over tea and cake.


Such encounters can’t really be choreographed and that really is part of the fun of this adventure. We never know who might be in the next boat to come up the lock or into the port. Other unexpected moments can add to the atmosphere as well. As we were sitting having a coffee in the cockpit late on Saturday morning, the sound of a piano-accordion floated our way. At first, we thought it was coming from a stereo in the house beside the lock but it turned out to be an accordionist, playing under the bridge next to the lock simply because the acoustics were so good there. When I went to investigate, he had an audience of cyclists, who had stopped in their tracks to listen to him play. It was a fabulous, quintessentially French moment, and yet unlikely ever to be repeated.