Into Africa

At the beginning of October we found ourselves within striking distance of St Jean de Losne and we were noticing the cooler mornings and evenings even though the days were glorious. There had been no rain since September 5th. We took M and M to Dijon, one of our favourite cities, to have a look around and then they would catch a TGV for Paris. We all had lunch in a nice café with the lovely Christian who took us on a brief walking tour of his city that he is so proud of. The lovely man then drove M and M to the station. Earlier in the day Christian took us to his travel agent as we had mentioned trying to find a ‘last minute’ cheap destination to somewhere warm where we could swim in the sea. Nadine recommended a resort in Djerba, Tunisia, which was on the beach, had all the usual features of a resort. The price included all meals and drinks as well as all activities except motorised water sports. As Tunisia is a former French colony, it is an easy destination for the French. We asked about the need for a visa and Nadine made a phone call to check on that important detail and was told an NZ passport and a return ticket were all that was needed.

We left Dijon on Sunday 11th and as usual J was anxious to be at the Gare in plenty of time to catch the TGV to Paris. Christian, with whom we were staying, assured us it only took 20 minutes to get to the station and as we had our tickets he could drop us very close to the platform and 10.30am would be plenty of time to catch a 10.52 an train. To cut a long story short, as we were all packed and ready at 9am, he decided to take us for a walk around Talant and Fontaine, two old and charming parts of Dijon before dropping us off at the railway station. The train ride to Paris was pleasant and uneventful, and it was amusing to follow part of the canal we did last year. A section that took us weeks last year took just 18 minutes in the TGV. At the Gare de Lyon, on Christian’s advice we took an airport shuttle bus instead of the metro because there would be fewer stairs to carry suitcases up and down. However, we were going to Terminal 3 at Charles de Gaulle and the shuttle bus route had changed. We must have dragged our suitcases well over one kilometre before we got to the terminal.

When we checked in, the lady at the counter frowned at our passports, called in the manager who made a phone call and verified that a NZ passport and a return ticket were adequate. We blithely thought that would be the end of the matter! The plane was an hour and a half late taking off which meant we had cooled our heels at the airport for nearly 5 hours. Terminal 3 is very much a satellite terminal with little to see or do. We were hungry and were able to buy a packet of biscuits to eat. We had chosen a salad for lunch when we got to Paris as we felt the need for vegetables. It had been lovely but hadn’t lasted the extra time till the (modest) in-flight meal had arrived. The flight itself was uneventful and the entertainment consisted solely of watching the progress of the plane’s journey from France into Africa.

We disembarked and joined the queue to go through the immigration check. When our entry documents were inspected a ‘manager’ was rung and we were summarily told to get our luggage and ‘sit over there’! We were given explanation and no opportunity to ask what the problem was. We were just told that we had no visa. Another couple was there, they had just had their visa cleared. They told us they had a visa but there was some discrepancy with the spelling of one person‘s name. It had taken them two hours to sort out. It was just after 9pm local time(10pm French time) and we had no visa of any description. So we waited. After about two hours a young man joined us. We chatted to him. His parents were locals and he lived in Belgium. He spoke good English. We said no one was telling us what was happening. He said the manager probably does not know, he would have to ring someone, perhaps our Embassy to find out. By now it was really late and we knew the shuttle that should have taken us to the resort would have gone ages ago. The young man was at least able to reassure us that the airport bank was open 24 hours and taxis were not expensive. The young man was given the all clear to leave and we were left alone and by now exhausted in an empty terminal in the early hours of the morning with no idea what was happening. If they were trying to make us worried, it was working.


The next time the manager walked by we were brave enough to ask him what was happening. We explained the lengths we had gone to and the advice we had from the travel agent and the counter at Charles de Gaulle. He dismissed all that as French inadequacy and reiterated we needed a visa and he was going to make a phone call about it. That he hadn’t made the call earlier was probably to emphasise the fact we were completely in his hands. By now we were more than a little concerned. Then abruptly he burst out of his office, all energy and action and told C to go off with another official. J was to stay with the luggage. As the minutes ticked by, J was getting more and more concerned. Another flight came in and was processed and then the terminal was empty again. J began to wonder how she and C had so meekly followed orders with no explanation! She also realised she would find it very difficult to speak to officials who spoke only Arabic and French and get information about where C was. After half an hour alone with a very active imagination, J decided that when the next flight came in she would shout out, ‘does anyone here speak English, I need help!’ Fortunately at that point, C arrived and said we would have our visas as soon as she had changed some euros to cover the fee of 20 dinar (about NZ$20). So the good news was we could legally stay for a week but by then we were wondering if we really wanted to.


We left the terminal to arrange for a taxi (the only transport option at that time of the day) to take us to Golf Beach Hotel which, for some reason, we thought was only about 7km away. There were a lot of taxis outside even though it was the early hours of the morning. We followed some advice we had in France and asked how much it would cost as apparently this was something one bartered. The man said there was a meter in the car. There seemed to be no option but to get in the car. About half a dozen other taxi drivers hooted and hollered at our driver when we said where we wanted to go. We had no idea what they were saying but it made us uncomfortable. We tried to take comfort from the fact that Tunisia needs its tourism industry and that we were probably safe. We were quickly out of the town area and were travelling very quickly out into ‘country’ area. The meter was ticking over at a frightening speed and heading towards 140 dinar (NZ$140) when the driver stopped at the Djerba Beach Hotel - we had asked to be taken to the Golf Beach Resort! We repeated the name of the our hotel and he said, OK it is just down the road. After a while - and a lot more clicks on the meter - C asked how much further it was and expressed some concern about the cost. He protested and told us that the reading on the meter wasn’t the 140 dinar we imagined but only 14 dinar. It transpires that in Tunisia they always put in three places their decimal point - not the two we are accustomed to. When he realised our misunderstanding he could hardly stop laughing. He kept hitting the steering wheel and cackling fit to kill. However, that broke the tension and the driver and C had a nice chat till we eventually got to the correct resort. The one hour‘s drive cost just over NZ$21, not the NZ$210 we thought we were going to have to pay. We finally got to our room at 2am, French time, exhausted, hungry and thirsty. We were too scared to drink the water out of the tap (with reason, it turns out) so had a shower and went to bed in the hope of tomorrow being a better day…

On reflection…
We can’t help wondering how 2 Tunisian women would get on trying to come to NZ for a week-long holiday after a stay in Australia; we suspect they may well find themselves on a plane back to wherever we had come from.

Our last three stops

JOINVILLE
We took one day to motor from St. Dizier to Joinville instead of the planned two. The intermediary stop, where we thought we would spend one night turned out to be very humble - and in the middle of nowhere. It had no services, which in good weather is no problem, but we decided to push on to Joinville where we could have electricity and turn on a heater if we got cold. Autumn has very definitely arrived with cooler mornings and evenings but usually with nice weather during the daytime. Joinville was an absolute treat and we stayed three nights instead of the one we had planned. The quay was well appointed, the mooring was free, as was the electricity and water. There was also an attractive and quite large picnic area, which was shared with camping cars and, unusually, there was quite a lot of interaction between boaties and mobile home owners. The spectacle of landing a fish certainly helped. The boat in front of us was owned by a German couple. The husband hooked a HUGE carp that took ages to land. By the time he did so, he had a very large audience but handled it all with great aplomb. Mercifully he quickly released the fish to fight another day. (Unlike another man in Sillery who caught a 13kg carp, had it out of the water for ages so it could be weighed and everyone have their photo taken and then it was put in a small net and left in the water all night and released in the morning. For what reason? We have no idea.)

Joinville had four supermarkets and a bricolage (hardware store) to check out. Catherine found a product that we hope will solve our leaking shower problem and busied herself digging out mastic that she had put in last year and replacing it with some two-part epoxy stuff that was a bit like plasticine when mixed and sets hard in 4 minutes. Time will tell if is does the job!

We especially enjoyed the company of Mike and Barbara, Brits in a camping car, Wally and Laurie, Canadians in a yacht called ‘The Do Littles’ with two dogs and a cat (all of whom sailed from Canada to France in their yacht having never done any blue water sailing before) and the lovely Katinka (Dutch turned Aussie) in a magnificent Dutch barge. Katinka’s husband, Scott, is working in Libya at the moment and so she will stay in Joinville for the next few weeks till he returns. It is true to say that we had two very convivial and enjoyable evenings. The third evening we were whacked and were happy to get an early night ready to navigate to Froncles.



FRONCLES
Another nice quay with water and electricity, not free but very reasonable at 6 euros for two nights mooring with electricity. Again it was shared with the camping cars. Catherine did some painting around the repair work in the shower and we both did a lot of little jobs that needed doing including of course the ubiquitous washing. We had an enjoyable bike ride in and around the place, chatted to other boaties and some camping car folk, especially Mike and Ann from the UK.


VIEVILLE (today 20th Sept.)
After a short hassle-free run from Froncles, being Sunday, we stopped and had a special lunch with a wine or two and so stayed put for the rest of the day. The mooring spot is - again - a delight. It has a very good quay, a picnic area and space for camping cars. Unusually, it also has a collection of fruit trees and at the moment there are three apple and one crab apple tree just dripping with ripe fruit. J picked a saucepan full of crab apples and they are already cooked and being strained ready to make crab apple jelly. We’ll need to buy some sugar for that - tomorrow at Chaumont. The apples are all a little on the tart side, so we are planning to make some tarts, or apple turnovers, so easy to do in our oven. We rested after lunch - as you do - then went for a one and a half hour bike ride in and around the area, which is wonderful. Very pastoral and picturesque. Many paddocks have been harvested of their crops and are ploughed ready for the next cycle. It really is a small but seemingly prosperous and very beautiful part of France.

Rain, Reims and getting ready for Rob…

In our last post, I think we were um-ing and ah-ing about whether or not to take the boat to Reims meet our friend, Rob, who was going to be staying in the area with friends and then joining us for a few days afterwards. I seem to recall that we were in Bar-le-Duc awaiting the arrival of a Waterways Guide to the Champagne-Ardenne region… (Waterways guides are an essential - we don’t go anywhere without the appropriate one for the region we are in. They provide maps of the waterway and surrounds with details of distances, locks, mooring spots, lock opening hours, telephone numbers to contact the VNF if there are any difficulties and other useful boatie information.) Thanks to a fantastic bookshop in Bar-le-Duc, the guidebook we were looking for arrived very speedily and we decided that we would indeed make the detour. That was in the last week of August. Without accident or incident, nor any particular highlights for that matter, we made our way to Vitry-le-François at the end of the Canal de la Marne au Rhin. We arrived there on the 30th of August, having been on that canal since the 11th of July. From our maps, it would appear to be the second longest of the French canals after the Canal du Rhône au Rhin.

The end of August also seems to have marked the end of summer. Although we have had some lovely weather since then, the thermometer has taken a definite dive, especially mornings and evenings. Some days have been decidedly chilly too! For a while we tried to convince ourselves that the different colour in some trees was because of the seed pods but we have now had to accept that it really does have more to do with the leaves changing colour. In fact, the damn things are even falling from the trees now, which makes denying the change of seasons even harder.

We were able to take our time heading towards Reims, which is just as well because we had several rainy days or half-days and - for fairly obvious reasons - we prefer not to navigate in the rain. It’s hard enough for J, who does the driving, but even less pleasant for C, who looks after the rope work when going through locks and has had the occasional drenching along the way. On one of the rainy days we navigated for just under an hour, making our way to Condé-sur-Marne at the junction of the Canal Lateral à la Marne and the Canal de l’Aisne à la Marne before deciding to give up for the day. Having not seen anyone we knew for weeks and weeks, we ran into two couples we knew there: Joy and Bill, a kiwi couple with a boat very like ours, and Pat and Eileen, an English couple on their new boat “Merlot 2” . (They still had the original “Merlot” when last we met them and funnily enough they had seriously considered buying Klaus and Irene’s boat - you’ll remember we befriended them in Nancy and may have mentioned that we lusted after their gorgeous “Antica“). While Joy and Bill decided to brave the conditions and keep navigating, Pat & Eileeen, like us, decided to hunker down for the rest of the day. Some of the time, we literally did that but during one break in the weather, we ducked out to see what Condé had to offer. There wasn’t a great deal but there was beautiful-looking church set in lovely grounds, which we could only appreciate from a distance because the gates to the grounds were locked. There was a not-very-inspiring looking café-bar and an open Boulanger (always a bonus!). There was also a little champagne house, the Maison Potié. We were just discussing the pros and cons of visiting it for a tasting, especially if you are not necessarily wanting to buy any wine, when it started to rain. Oh well, we were too far to make it to the boat and stay dry, so we opted for a champagne tasting instead. (Well, what would expect us to do?!)

What a good move that was! The woman who served us was just delightful: and happy to talk about the wines, the harvest (which will be happening as we write) and more than happy for us to taste our way through their range of champagnes (Brut, Extra-Brut, Blanc de Blanc and Rosé) providing VERY generous tastings along the way - whether we wanted to buy any or not…. Of course, she is a wise and clever saleswoman and when we left her place, the skies were brighter and our wallets lighter. We bought one of each of the wines we tried at an average of around 13 euros a bottle. That’s really extravagant for us as we usually buy in the 2-4 euros-a-bottle range here but it doesn’t seem that expensive for what is very good champagne indeed. We also bought a jar of Peach jam, made from funny little peaches which have an intense flavour. The bottle of bubbly certainly stood up to the test that evening as we shared it with Pat and Eileen on their beautiful new boat.

We ended up not taking the boat into Reims, although we did go there ourselves. Every boatie we spoke to put us off the idea:, it was too expensive, too industrial, full, noisy, not pleasant, not in a nice part of town… Not a single boatie recommended it, so we decided (as so many boaties do), to base ourselves at Sillery, just 10 km to the south-east of the city and to visit from there. We also figured that Rob’s friends would be happy enough to drop him off there (and so it turned out). We had three days in Sillery, the first of them Thursday) was fine and sunny but with a cool breeze. Anyone who knows us well, would recognise a good day to get the clothes washed and dried in preparation for a guest on the boat, so that’s what we did. And we were able to get a new gas bottle and 80 litres of diesel from the supermarket, conveniently situated just a few hundred metres away. With Saturday dedicated to cleaning, grocery shopping and making sure the boat was ready to host our guest, that left Friday for us to visit Reims.

It rained; gently at the start of the day as we got on the bus with one or two students from Sillery who have to go to Reims to attend secondary school and then more heavily as we arrived in Reims. It was not quite 9am and the first return bus was not until 5:30 in the evening (the times are to suit the school children; other passengers fit in around them). We were there for the day and it was too early for anything to be open other than a café… We had coffee and stayed under cover for an hour before venturing out into the city, still in the rain. Suffice to say that no city is at its best in those conditions and even less so when half of its central city roads are being dug up to put in a tram line. We did our best to stay warm and dry by buying an all-day ticket for the buses. There are two lines that go past the majority of the tourist highlights but to catch them you have to find the appropriate bus stop first. That proved quite a challenge as the ones we were looking for - it was pouring by this stage - had been moved because of the road works and no-one seemed to know where they had been moved to, least of all us. The day did have some highlights. The cathedral - yet another Notre Dame - is a stunner as you might expect of the church where every king of France (from Clovis in 498 to Charles X in 1825) was crowned. It’s in the middle of some significant restoration work and the information about that was fascinating too. The St Remi Basilica was fabulous too and perhaps more appealing in some ways. It houses the remains of St Remi, the bishop who crowned Clovis in 498. That sort of thing can be a bit hard for us to get our New World heads around! Lunch was good too and the return to a nice, dry, comfortable and homely boat was never more welcome! I think we owe it to Reims to return for a visit on a sunny day…

…and the sun did come out again the following week when Rob was on board, for which we were very grateful. Doing the tourist thing in the rain may not be much fun but being three on a relatively small boat in the rain doesn’t have a lot to recommend it either.

Sometimes...

...there just isn't a whole lot to write home about. This is one of those times. We are in the charming but noisy port at Bar-le-Duc a couple of weeks earlier than anticipated. We're on the Marne-Rhine canal and there is very little traffic - we see perhaps one of two other boats each day. The weather is fine and we are both well.

Now that we have managed to track down a Waterways Guide for Champagne-Ardenne, we can decide where to go next. We are to meet our friend, Rob, on the 6th of September and he will be "somewhere near Reims". As Reims is the capital of the Champagne region, there is some incentive to see if we can get there, even if it wasn't part of our initial planning. We'll do some study and let you know.

The "high point" of this canal involved negotiating a 4.78km long tunnel at the lowest speed we could possibly manage without losing steerage - it took about 1 hour 20 minutes and wasn't a whole lot of fun. All the information we read or received about it (including some in writing from the VNF that day), suggested that we would be towed through the tunnel by an electric chain tug because there is no ventilation. This didn't happen and we had to follow the chain tug and two other boats through under motor at minimum speed. Because of the chain tug system - whether it is towing or not - there are only two times in the day when you can go through the tunnel in either direction. Because of the lock opening hours, it's impossible to get from the previous port to the tunnel entrance before the morning crossing at 10:30, so the three boat represented all the westward traffic for the day.

Leaving Bar-le-Duc today and heading towards the end of the canal at Vitry-le-Francois. When we get there, we'll need to decide where next.

A week in Toul

We are in Toul and have been here since Monday. We plan to leave next Monday but that is flexible too. We needed a cheapish, pleasant place to stay at to catch up on a lot of little jobs, some of them leaky windows and a place called Toul seems appropriately named for stopping to do jobs. They are not life-threatening but are a constant source of irritation. It costs 6 euros a night to stay here, water and electricity included, and 1 euro for a shower, which can do two people. We booked in for a week at a bit of a discount, 30 euros for the week. The port itself is pleasant, close to the centre of town with good supermarkets and other services. We enjoyed an early evening of free wine tasting of the local product (Cotes de Toul) just over the road from the port, and the bread from the Boulangerie also just over the road is possibly the best we have had. We have made a good start on jobs and have even done some we hadn’t planned on doing. The weather has so far been glorious with fabulous evenings.

We have met, and re-met, lots of lovely people and a few kiwis (some lovely and some fellows who are your typical, helpful kiwi bloke) We had a rude and stroppy bully of a Frenchman one night who berated the poor capitainerie lady because he had moored his boat only to find all the power points had been taken. There were plenty of places in other parts of the port with power points but no, he didn’t want to move and he didn‘t think he should have to pay full price if he didn‘t have electricity. The solution was apparently to share a power point… Without talking to us he pulled our plug out, added a dodgy looking connection that hopefully would give power to both boats. C had a spirited word or two with him in French pointing out that it wasn’t usual behaviour to meddle with our power without asking and making it obvious that she expected him to do something about protecting the connection from possible rain. With bad grace he endeavoured to protect the connection with a plastic bag. As it happened all went well but the contretemps was unpleasant and was heard by all the neighbouring boaties. Compare that with another Frenchman who tied up last night and encountered the same problem. He came and nicely asked us if he could put in a double adaptor to ‘share’ a power point and of course we were happy to oblige. Also he had a ‘proper’ connection so it was safe.

We are loving our boat more and more and having seen in and out of a lot of different models of boats have come to appreciate certain features of our one. Many boats have lots of narrow sets of stairs separating one area of the boat from another. Ours has two steps leading from the saloon down to the galley and cabins. Very few have an ‘island’ double bed, in fact many - usually Dutch boats - don‘t have a double bed at all. Our gas stove has four rings, a griller and an oven, which seems to be unusual. Erewhon has quite a flat bottom and draws only 60cm of water. It is quite beamy (that means “wide” or “broad” for those without a boating background) at 3.6 metres and doesn’t rock as much as many of the boats which have deeper keels, high superstructures and elevated steering positions. We had a mouth-watering, brand new steel boat moored next to us for a few days. It was similar to our boat in many ways in terms of the general layout but that was where the similarities ended. It was owned by a very nice Dutch couple and it was built in Holland with special features they particularly wanted. It had all the bells and whistles, including satellite tv, stern and bow thrusters, and a washing machine. C constantly reminds J that Erewhon does in fact have a stern and a bow thruster - her! She fulfils the role in many situations by pushing off a lock wall or pontoon from the front, back or middle of the boat, as required. Unlike real bow thrusters, however, she is completely ineffective when we are trying to manoeuvre in the middle of the water when there is nothing solid to push against.

We haunt bricolage stores (hardware eg Mitre 10 Mega) and are delighted to find solutions to various little challenges we want to solve. One needs time to look carefully at what’s for sale because with everything written in French, it is not always immediately obvious what a particular product is for. You also can’t always find an equivalent product to what we would get at home, so the “solution” might end up looking quite different to what we first imagined. Some brand products are available in some stores and not others eg Sikaflex and a particular degreasing cleaner that is fantastic. It can be frustrating if you cannot get what you want and some jobs are either deferred until you can get it or you use a product that might not do the job properly. Occasionally, in a bigger town, it is possible to cycle or catch a bus to a big industrial zone to find what you want. We have cycled, bussed and walked back to the boat with all manner of odd loads including carpet and lengths of timber.

We watch the way different people do things and constantly copy or modify their better ideas to suit ourselves. A shortish rope with a loop spliced at both ends has proved very useful. It can be used when wanting to tie up quickly to moor the stern of the boat to a bollard, then deal with the other ropes. It is great to use when locking up or down sometimes if there is a ladder or pole to loop around. It is safer and easier to manage than a long rope. A short length of hose with a trigger rose attachment designed for watering gardens makes a quick and refreshing shower to cool off if we are on shore water. If we want a warm shower well all we have to do is lay out the whole length of the hose in the sun and in 10 minutes we can have a warm shower, or a too hot one, if we are not careful!

One of the interesting things about being in one port for a while is to get a feel for the rhythm of the place and to watch the comings and goings of the different boats. Here in Toul, the port is sandwiched between two locks, both very close to the port. Although all the guide books say that the locks are operational from 7am-7pm, the ones here most definitely do not function before 9am. Every morning, just before nine, we hear the sound of boat motors kicking into action and rush hour begins. Boats take off in both directions for the next hour or so and then the calm reigns once again. There is occasional traffic throughout the day - departures, arrivals and through traffic- but things start to get busy again around mid-afternoon as boats arrive to take up their moorings for the night. There is always a real mixture of nationalities represented each night. There are, of course, the great traditional users of the inland waterways: German, Dutch, Belgian and British; some French but not as many as you might expect; lots of Swiss boaties too, especially in these eastern parts of France. While we’ve been here, we’ve also seen an Austrian boat, one Danish and one Swedish boat, one American, one Australian and an over-representation of New Zealanders with three boats passing through the port in the five days so far. The boats come in all shapes and sizes as well but there is another whole post to be written about that sometime…

High points

The “top” or high point of a canal is always an interesting and often a challenging place. This is often where the canal is at its steepest, so lock “staircases”, where one lock follows another and another in close proximity are common. There are often also tunnels; our longest so far having been our first - the Pouilly tunnel at the top of the Canal de Bourgogne was 3.333km long. The stretch of water between along the top of the canal is know as the dividing pound (a pound being the term used to describe the stretch of water between one lock and the next).

The Canal de la Marne au Rhin is unusual in that it has two dividing pounds - the Mauvages pound between the Meuse and Moselle valleys, which we have yet to encounter, and the Vosges pound between the Meurthe and the Zorn valleys, which we have just traversed in both directions on our trip from Nancy to Strasbourg and back. The Vosges pound is 33km long - that’s 33km without any locks. A luxury! It has a most spectacular example of canal engineering at each end. We approached the dividing pound from the Nancy end, which meant coming up the Rechicourt lock, the highest Freycinet gauge lock on the French waterways system. Freycinet was the chief waterways engineer in the late 19th century and he standardised the dimensions of the canals and the locks, and therefore the barges that could travel along them. The locks are 41m long and 5.5m wide. The Rechicourt lock is 15.4m high and when it was built, it replaced a flight of six locks. It is imposing to look at and is some five metres higher than any lock we’ve met to date.

We have, however, learnt not to fear big locks. In general they are gentle giants, where the water enters and leaves in such a way as to ensure a smooth ride up or down. The sign at the bottom of the lock announced a maximum wait of an hour and informed us that the locking process took 30 minutes each way. This confirmed that it would be a slow but probably comfortable trip. A trio of boats had just gone into the lock from the bottom as we approached, so we knew we had at least an hour to wait; looking at the size of the two boats in front of us in the queue, we thought it could well be longer. Both boats were approximately 15m long and our boat measures 11.6m (without the bathing platform on the back we think…). That’s more than 40m in length. But when the lock gates opened again, the VNF man in control of operations was sure he could fit us all in - and he did. But to say we were nose to tail would be understating the situation - we were actually overlapping in the lock, using not only every last centimetre of length but every one of width as well! Even with a smooth rise to the water, this was a most uncomfortable trip as C tried to keep the boat away from the stern of the boat in front and J used boathook and mop (which is less slippery) to keep our stern - and in particular our brand, spanking new platform - away from the formidable metal gates at the back of the lock. I can tell you that we were happy to get out of there and even happier at the prospect of 33 lock-free kilometres, even if they did include two tunnels!

At the other end of those 33km is the Arzwiller inclined plane, which must be the ultimate in luxury locking experiences! This can best be described as a boat lift. You drive your boat into what looks like a more or less normal lock, tie up and the whole section of the canal is raised or lowered by counter weights over a vertical height of 44.55m and a horizontal length of 128.65m. The inclined plane, which went into operation in 1969, replaced 17 standard locks. It used to take around 8 hours to negotiate those locks. The inclined plane takes around 25 minutes altogether, including the actual “journey” time of four and a half minutes. But the very best thing about it is that it is entirely stress-free for the boaties. Once you’ve tied up, all you have to do is sit back and admire the scenery or marvel at the masterpiece of engineering. You don’t even have to keep a hold on your ropes - magic!


It was no less magic on the return trip either - possibly more so. The evening before, we moored in the basin below the inclined plane, which is at the head of a beautiful valley. On a beautiful afternoon and evening, we were able to watch the inclined plane in action from this gorgeous spot. We went up the hill to visit the museum and souvenir shop - both something of a disappointment but as boaties, we at least didn’t have too pay for the visit. We did, however, get a small poster featuring a view of the inclined plane that was better than any photo we’d be able to take ourselves.

We were in the first group to go up the inclined plane in the morning and relished the idea of not having to negotiate our way up 17 locks, which is much harder than going down. A day later we were in front of the Rechicourt lock and again arrived in time to watch three boats enter the lock in front of us, which inevitably meant another wait of about an hour. We eyed up the boat in front and behind us and decided that as they were both about 13m in length, we would fit more comfortably into the lock with these two than was the case on our way up. However, it was a different VNF employee, in charge that day and obviously one with a different philosophy in these matters. He decided that two boats constituted a full lock and put us through with a luxurious amount of space and in complete comfort.
The impact of this decision was greater than would seem at first. The boat in front of us turned around soon afterwards and any boats behind us were now at least an hour behind. For the rest of the day we had the luxury of being able to pass through the locks on our own.

Puncture in the park

In the last post we mentioned a punctured bicycle tyre but there was another little story behind that comment. I think we’ve told you more than once how much we enjoy cycling here. We love our bikes (why is it that you can’t buy real, comfortable ladies’ bikes in NZ???) and we love the freedom of taking them new places. We also love the exercise - up to a point.

We’ve been riding our bikes all over the place for a navigating season and a half without ever having thought about taking a puncture repair kit anywhere with us - even though there are at least three of them on board the boat and even though Prue had a puncture on one of the bikes last year when she and Paul were spending time with us. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to C that it might be quite a good idea if we put one of the repair kits into one of our backpacks so that it was with us when and where we had a puncture. We all know that if you are going to puncture a tyre, it will happen at the farthest possible point from home, which in our case happens to be the boat...

...and of course this was exactly what did happen. On our longest bike ride in the last two years, at around 12 or 13km from the boat, J picked up a big staple in her tyre. We had just come back over the Rhine from Germany and were in French side of the park which goes along the banks on both sides of the river. Having a puncture repair kit with us was not the only bit of luck. The staple had stayed in the tyre so we were easily able to find the puncture hole in the inner tube. Those of you who have repaired tyres in the past will know what a blessing that was! We were able to fix the puncture in no time but there remained one small problem - we didn’t have a tyre pump with us. There is only one of these on the boat and it is a big, foot-operated pump and as such not so easily slipped into a backpack every time we go for a ride… We were, however, on a cycle path in the park and as soon as we started the repair, we began asking the occasional passing cyclists if they had a pump. By the time we had the patch on the tyre, we hadn’t found anyone with a pump. We were, however, right next to a part of the park that was cordoned off for a circus and C noticed that they seemed to have quite a lot of bikes in a shed behind the fence. Where there are a lot of bikes, surely there would also be a pump. And indeed there was along with a lovely man who was perfectly happy to lend it to us and to make sure we had the right sort of attachment for our tyres… In fact, the most difficult part of the operation was finding the entrance to the circus enclosure in the first place!

By the time C returned with the pump, she found J being assisted by a lovely couple of older cyclists, who had their grandson with them. The conversation was delightful and conducted in the best mix of franglais, gesture and goodwill. While apparently unable to assist with the pump, they were most concerned that we should be able to successfully complete the operation and the gentleman helped J get the inner tube back into the outer tyre casing. With the tyre successfully reinflated and tested, C returned the pump to the circus reception with our most grateful thanks. Meanwhile, the couple who had ridden off returned and revealed to J - amidst some hilarity - that the woman did have a pump on her bike after all! She just didn’t know it was there. It looked as though it was part of the carrier and they’d only found it because they examined their bikes more carefully after running across us with our puncture.

And the final bit of good fortune was that all this took place outside the toilets in the park, which must be amongst the cleanest and best appointed public toilets in the country. When we set forth again we did so in comfort and with sparklingly clean hands.