Our cruise to Belgium was great fun, and we had a very pleasant experience in the boatyard, which doesn't happen often, but now we are back home in Paris, and enjoying life in our port. This is what we did last night to celebrate le quatorze juillet (the fourteenth of July), France's national holiday.
Friends from the port and from town gathered together at our local firehouse to dance and drink Champagne au Bal des Pompiers.
From Meaux to Cumières with a stop in Nogent L'Artaud. Up early in the morning, pulling away from one pontoon at 7:30am and landing on another after 5pm. The constant rain after Château Thierry kept us huddled inside trying to keep warm as we cruised along the normally beautiful Marne, which looks less attractive in the cold and the rain.
After a long, cold, and very enjoyable winter in Paris, we are on the move again. We passed through the lock at the Arsenal at 9am on April 29th, turned left, and headed for the Marne. Our ultimate destination is the Meuse et Sambre shipyard in Andenne, Belgium, but for the first night we were happy to make it all the way to Lagny-sur-Marne.
You can, of course, drive from Paris to Lagny in about 45 minutes if the traffic is light, and if you really want to go that fast. You can also be in Andenne in 3 hours if you care to be out there on the freeway with all of that traffic, but for us there is nothing like the slow travel option that the rivers and canals offer.
By barge, it took us 7 hours just to get to the pontoon in Lagny where we spent our first night, and then starting off again early the next morning, we put in another 4 hours to arrive in Meaux at noon. We stayed in Meaux two nights because the locks were closed on May 1st, and we will take off again early tomorrow morning to put in 3 weeks of 8 hour days before we eventually get to Andenne. How is that possible? Hard to explain, but maybe this 5 minute video of two days of travel by barge will give you some idea of how pleasant it is to take the slow way to get where you are going.
