Laurie and I have always, on our travels, been drawn to water: rivers and canals in particular. So it’s no surprise that today (May 19 – late post because of no Internet until today, May 29), the first sunny day we’ve had since we arrived, we would choose to walk along a canal that runs a mile or so south of here. The surprise was what we encountered there.
Canals criss-cross France; they are nearly all connected, so a canal boat can travel from the very north of France to the Mediterranean. Old canals are not wide, and the locks on them are built to a standard length and width specification which was once suitable for canal boats carrying goods. Today, though, for a canal boat to be profitable, it must be huge, and so they are limited to the larger rivers: near Chartrettes, where Mary and Gilles live, is a lock that is probably a quarter of a mile long and fifty yards wide. BIG boats use it, loaded heavily with rock and sand being taken to cement factories on the Seine north of Paris.
To a large extent, the old canals are left to pleasure boats: the canal-boat tours that are so popular, and private vessels, often converted from older, no-longer-profitable working boats. The canals are maintained beautifully and, for us, offer beautiful and peaceful walks. And for some reason, Laurie and I always enjoy watching boats go through the locks on canal or river.
This morning we walked along the Loing Canal, which parallels the Loing River (remember, we’re living in Montigny-sur-Loing: “Montigny on the Loing”. We reached a lock and while we were there, a car roared down the road to the lock, a man (wearing a tee-shirt, shorts and sandals, despite the cold breeze that blew) jumped out and set the lock to be ready for a boat coming upstream. Then he jumped in his car and roared off. We started to walk farther down the canal and saw that a boat was, indeed, coming upstream. So we walked back to the lock – l’ecluse – and waited. The boat eased into the lock as the lock-keeper returned. This was a tour-boat. We talked to the captain, who told us that he had 20 people on-board, that it was a bicycle tour, that everyone was off on their bikes and that he was going meet them in Nemours, 6 miles distant; he would arrive there in about 3 hours. Speed is not a factor on these canals.
The boat locked-through, and another boat arrived from upstream. This was a smaller, private vessel. It came into the locks, tied up and the owner stepped off and greeted us in poorly-pronounced French. Laurie commented on the sunshine, and the owner laughed and started speaking to us in English. Soon his wife joined us, finished with her duty of tying the front of the boat to the lock. They said that the lock-keeper had told them, at the last lock, that he would not be able to lock them through until after his lunch, which ended at 1 o’clock. So they were stuck for an hour.
We chatted with them for a while. They were from Ireland, and had been boating through France for four years; well, the parts of four years that the canals are open; it turns out that the canals close from October to March. Soon, Michael (we’d introduced ourselves by then; his wife was Rosemary) asked if we’d like to have a glass of wine with them. So onto the boat we went, and Michael opened a bottle of champagne.
The conversation flowed and Rosemary asked if we could stay for lunch! Out came more wine, a beautiful salad she’d made, paté, sliced ham (a French staple), anchovies and cheese. We sat at a table on the back of the boat and had a wonderful meal with them. In fact, the lock-keeper returned and Michael asked him if he could delay locking them through for half an hour.
I think we could have stayed all afternoon, but when the half-hour was up, the lock-keeper started making impatient noises and then another boat arrived. We took a hurried tour of their boat (the Mabel-Rose) and by the time we jumped off, the boat was half-way down in the lock; another minute and we would have needed a ladder to get off. If we’d known the next lock to be not too far away, we would have stayed on board and floated down the Loing Canal with Rosemary and Michael and gotten off there to walk back. But we didn’t know how far we would have to walk (turned out to be about three miles), so we waved to Rosemary and Michaels as they disappeared around a bend in the canal.
We love serendipitous adventures like this. We have learned that being friendly and curious brings us experiences like this.We gave Rosemary and Michael our email addresses (the boat is fully connected to the ‘net) and I suspect we’ll be in touch, and we hope we can connect with them as we and they see France. They were delightful; it feels as if meeting them really started our French adventure.