Blog 4 2019

    Written 25^th September 2019

    Two things happened since we last wrote in early July.

        We had another heatwave, this time up to 43ºC (109ºF)

         Virtually all the canal system in central France closed due to lack of water 

         and left many stranded with only 10 days notice.

Since the 26^th July we have been trapped in our home port between 2 closed locks, for the duration of the season. 2 ‘dry’ winters are responsible and we hope this changes before next year, so we can travel again.

So, after a brief return home during August, we came back to France and drove down to the South of France to visit an English friend with an old barge on the Canal du Midi which, strangely, is still open along with one or two sections of other canals. Obviously the rivers are navigable, if you can reach them.

The journey itself was one of the best road trips I have ever had, once we had got the first days travel behind us and left the extinct volcanoes of the Puy de Dôme in central France behind us.

The A75 AutoRoute from Clermont-Ferrand to Montpellier is a marvel of engineering and stunning landscapes through the Cantal, Lozère, Aveyron and Tarn départements to the Med. In Hérault.

As we entered the motorway the TomTom announced ‘keep straight on for the next 340 kilometres’ and we relax with the superb smooth surface and quiet traffic level of the motorway.

For the next 4 hours or so, the road repeatedly climbs to over 1200 metres (higher than Snowdon) with pine-clad hillsides dotted with cattle and sheep, then plunges down sweeping bends with escape lanes and huge signs  recommending drives to ‘engage engine braking’.

I disengaged the automatic gearbox and did so several times to save my brakes as the slopes were steep and very, very long.

Just when it seemed we had reached the bottom, the road ejected us from between two steep hillsides and across dizzying viaducts over gorges and valleys down below. In this way the car flew high over entire villages, looking like little models with the ochre roofs typical of the region.

I glanced down at church spires hundreds of feet below while Sue peeped through her fingers muttering ‘don’t tell me – I don’t want to know’.

Then we would start to climb again and the whole performance repeated with impossible viaducts over pretty villages, steep climbs and drops.

Then came the ‘piéce de résistance’ (which came as a bit of a shock to Sue!) – the famous Millau viaduct, a 2.5 km long viaduct joining 2 valley sides at a breathtaking height.

As we swept down from above and rounded a bend it came into view ahead and below us, looking impossibly beautiful and delicate hanging in mid-air on seemingly thin silver strands of wire like a spider’s web. A magic fairy-tale and an engineering masterpiece at the same time.

Fortunately, I would get to see it again on the return journey. Sue was impressed but not very happy but, some 20 viaducts later I hoped her fear of heights would be allayed a little (Note from Sue – ‘Nope!’).

The A75 ‘Méridienne’ is the nearest thing to flying in a car and, amazingly, the only AutoRoute mainly free of tolls (there is a fee for crossing at Millau), and my favourite as you have probably gathered by now!

Blog 3 2019

Written 9^th and 10^th July 2019

Fortunately, the ‘canicule’ heatwave has passed (for now), so we have taken advantage of the cooler mornings (around 20-22) to drive the 1½ hrs to Guedelon, where a medieval castle is being built from scratch, entirely by hand in the medieval manner.

It was a beautiful sunny day and we drove on almost traffic-free roads between fields of golden cereal crops awaiting harvest.

For mile after mile the road rose and fell over rolling hills in dead straight lines (thank you the Romans). With national speed limits set at 80kmh (50mph) and even 70 (42mph) in places, we had time to take in the unbroken views of rural Burgundy as far as the eye could see.

A couple of small villages broke up the journey, most with a stately ‘Mairie’ (Town Hall) flying the French tricolour from the balcony, the boulangerie, tabac, and even a café or two in the town square – a rarer sight now, unfortunately, in these difficult times for the French economy.

Having arrived at Guedelon at around 12.00, I became very French and joined the queue for food in the outdoor restaurant with dozens of other visitors from France and all over the world. Within minutes I was eating boeuf bourgignon with carrots and potatoes and swilling this down with apple juice from a producer in the Forêt d’Othe woodland, close to St.Flo. Sue and Laddie opted for the bread and cheese plate only (3 small pieces of cheese and some heavy bread for only 3€ less than mine) 

The visitor is free to walk round this large site with buildings (built to match the theme) housing various workshops for the blacksmith, the ropemaker, the dyer, the roof and floor tile producers etc.

       

The raw materials are all in view – rocks in the quarry, the clay pit, the felled timbers awaiting cutting into roof beams and finer moulding etc.

Giant wheels in which, like a hamster, one man walks to work the pulley to raise massive blocks of stone up to the battlements are now almost redundant as, after 20 years or more, the building approaches its final stages.

By the time we left, the temperature had risen to 26ºC and we headed back to St.Flo by another equally beautiful route, for Laddie to plunge gratefully into the cool water of the marina while we put the kettle on for the inevitable 5pm cup of tea so as not to disappoint our local friends, horrified to see us with a hot drink a) in the heat and b) at that time of day!

Cold G+T and beers were to follow later!  

A good day out for less than €40 including food !

Snippets of French Life

The ‘O’ level exams (brevet) took place in the first week of July. The individual results of each local candidate were published in the local paper today 10^th July in alphabetical order. How’s that for fast marking!  They’re all on their 8 weeks holiday now! All 4116 of them in our department of the Yonne (89).

The grass is tinder dry with lack of rain and wild fires are happening daily. 15 appliances and 40 firemen attended one yesterday when 47 cars were burned out. They were parked in a field while the owners attended a children’s sports event. 400 kids were evacuated.

Our local paper reports that firemen were called out 585 times in the last 8 days, mainly to crop fires in wheat and barley fields.

8 road deaths in 10 days locally have prompted one grieving father to complain about the rows of solid plane trees which have graced France’s country roads since Napoleonic days and have become a classic part of the French image.

Young drivers are dying every week here (as elsewhere) whether due to drugs, alcohol or mobile phones, but certainly not due to plane trees jumping out in front of them.

Drought has been declared and water levels are falling leading to travel restrictions on some canals with groupage necessary to go through the locks.  No rain is forecast so so we are not moving for the moment but we have been invited on to our friends much larger boat from the 20th July to spend two weeks over near the Loire where hopefully it will be navigable and less busy.

Will keep you posted as this develops.

Blog #2 2019

Written Sunday 23^rd June

Remember the wind gusts forecast on the 7^th June? Well, around 8pm we were eating dinner and Sue looked across at the English-owned barge - Redquest – moored along the bank from us and saw the ladder on their wheelhouse roof lifted into the air. They had gone back to England the day before and the ladder was supposed to hold down the tarp covering the solar panels.

Next thing we see our French neighbour, Bernard, on the Redquest fighting with a solar panel that had blown off the roof. It was dangling over the water on its electric cable.

I dashed round to join him together with another ‘batelier’ to lift it back up into place.

We secured it with one of our spare mooring ropes.

The next morning I went into the port office and Vincent rewound the security film and we watched the moment when first the ladder blew off, followed by the tarp, followed by one of the solar panels!   "Mon Dieu"   "Ooh la la"

When the poor owner (from Sunderland) had arrived a couple of days earlier, from the South of France in his camper van, we watched as he tried to repair the air conditioning unit on the roof of the van. This had been virtually torn off when he went under a too low bridge. He’s said to be touring the Lake District now!

Saint Florentin is dominated by a huge church on top of the hill in the town centre. 

You can see it from miles around. 

An Englishman who spends his summer moving hire boats around, told me that the stained glass windows were spectacular so, as I was in town on Friday afternoon, I went into the Bureau de Tourisme to ask for the key to the church.

I approached a young lady seated behind a computer terminal and made my request.

• -       I need your ‘Carte d’Identité’ monsieur, s’il vous plaît
• -       We don’t have identity cards in England

She looked totally bemused.

• -       But the computer needs your identity number
• -       I don’t have one. We don’t have them in England – but I do have my driving licence in my wallet with my photograph on it

I produced it and she turned it over in her hands looking at it suspiciously – obviously disturbed by this unheard-of anomaly

She called to an older woman for help in satisfying the demands of the computer programme.

After a thorough search of the licence card, front and back, horizontally and vertically, she found two letters followed by an 8 digit code in miniscule print on the bottom right hand corner of the reverse side.

This satisfied the computer and the young lady finally handed me a huge, wrought-iron, key, but only after she insisted on handing me a map and a guide book, even though the church was, literally, just across the road.

• -       Go through the big red doors and lock them behind you when you’re inside (rather worrying) and lock them behind you again when you leave.

The quantity and quality of the stories illustrated in the glass panels was amazing and I spent more time there than I expected.

The lock rattled as a party of 3 French came in, and I duly locked them in behind me when I left.

• -       Where have you been (asked Sue on my return)
• -       To the opticians to get my glass fixed but I nipped into the church to have a look.

I don’t think she was impressed with my extra-curricular activities.

Latest weather forecast :

          Tomorrow    Monday       34ºC

                               Tuesday       35ºC

                               Wednesday  40ºC  (104F)

                               Thursday      39ºC

                               Friday          39ºC

There’s absolutely no way we are travelling in these temperatures but we are happy to stay in St.Flo with French friends and some old Australian friends just arrived in port. So we’re drinking chilled wine and catching up and, of course, we have a nice cool car to travel round in if it gets too unbearable.

Back on the ID subject, I took great delight in telling the French locals who come to the port every day to sit under the trees that, when we went to vote in the recent elections, we needed to produce no documents whatsoever and that we had a pencil on a piece of string to mark our X in the box and that was it.

Horrified expressions all round.

I manged to restrain myself from saying that, unlike France, we were not brought up in a police state where we can be randomly stopped by the police and asked for “papiers, s’il vous plaît”.

Sometimes it is good to be reminded of our relative freedoms in the UK.

 SCENES FROM 'DOWNTOWN' ST.FLO

LEADEN SUN - ANNOUNCING THE HEATWAVE (canicule)

Blog #1 2019

Monday 27^th May – Friday 7^th June

Without anything special happening it’s been non-stop these last 10 days.

Despite my fears about driving down to Kent on Bank Holiday Monday, all went smoothly through the road works and we were in our hotel in Wisques in Northern France by late afternoon, and Laddie happily romping on the lawn.

French motorways are the only place I can use cruise control – with light traffic and smooth surfaces it’s absolute bliss, and stress-free (we have to pay of course but worth every cent).

Day 2 (Tuesday) mid- afternoon saw us arrive at our Burgundy base of Saint Florentin (St.Flo) to be met with warm greetings by Vincent the port manager as we pulled up by ‘Blue Moon’.

Sue’s face dropped ‘it’s moored the wrong way round!!’

The side door was on the opposite side to us so offloading all our stuff would mean going up to the top deck and then down into the cabin and our boxes and bags were heavy. Young Cedric (local adolescent schoolboy) appeared to help Vincent and their two pairs of hands attached more ropes fore and aft and turned the 32ft long, 10 ton boat by hand, on a sixpence (or less than a Euro at least) in minutes.

Crisis over and unloading began.

That afternoon and the following day, we were embraced and kissed on both cheeks (sometimes twice) by a succession of male and female French boat owners and locals so many times we lost count.

In between the ‘grosses bises’ we toiled in the hot sun to wash the green winter slime from the boat’s exterior. Fortunately, the interior had been left neat and tidy by our neighbours, Michel and Nathalie, who had delivered the boat back for us last season from Decize to St.Flo. but the many boxes and bags took a couple of days to be stashed away so we could actually get onto the boat without tripping over them.

Laddie found a young playmate Victoria, a hyperactive 12 year old French schoolgirl, who tried her best to tire both of them out from dawn to dusk, which was a mostly a big help to us (but boy was she annoying, especially when she was still trying to get Laddie to play late evening and we (and Laddie) were looking for some peace and quiet).

Her dad, a Lyonnais from Paris sent her to invite us to an impromptu Ascension Day holiday drinks party on Thursday May 30^th. 2 Germans, 3 French and 2 Brits we sat at a picnic bench under the trees on the marina ‘lawn’ and drank mixtures of strong beer, Chablis and Ricard pastis and told anecdotes in as many languages, though mainly English. Common experiences too as the German lady knew well a pub in Baden, Switzerland where I would drink beer with my old friend Uri. Small world.

We finally got our dinner at around 9pm, leaving the others to continue until well after dark.

A week later and we now have another ‘Fête National’ weekend starting today, Friday 7^th June until next Tuesday when schools and industry return to work for another 4 day week. This time it’s for Whitsuntide. This is known as ‘faire le pont’ (to do the bridge) in France and happens whenever a bank holiday falls during the week. Last week we had Ascension Day on the Thursday so the ‘bridge’ went from Wednesday thru to Sunday night. Where did we go wrong?

With temperatures up to 34º this last week, the weather has now turned to rain and gusts of up to 50 mph are forecast tonight.

This next week we are hoping to get our small, hardwood mast back from a fellow, local, boat-owner, Bernard, who took it away to strip the flaking varnish off when I asked if anyone had an electric sander I could borrow. When I saw him yesterday he said (in French of course) ‘I’ve got 3 coats on it so far’.

I feel a ‘thank-you’ bottle of whiskey will be coming his way soon!

More soon