Zumstegs on the Go

Last year I posted some meanderings about our current home of Bois-le-Roi, so just a few notes here. Bois-le-Roi is about 35 minutes by train south of Paris, with a population of about 5,600.

Our “home away from home” in Bois-le-Roi:

The cottage in which we’re staying. Penny and Pierre’s children called it “Snow White’s Cottage” when they were kids, so we’ve named it chez Snow White.” That’s our bedroom window at the top.

Our “dining room.”

Lunch time! We eat every meal we can outdoors, weather permmitting.

Cheese plate! This is a small amount of cheeses that Gilles brought back from Auvergne. Clockwise from the top: St. Nectaire, Saler, Tommes de Brebi, Bleu de Laqueuille.

Here is an example of one thing that fascinates us about France: we went for a walk with our friend Mary yesterday. We walked a little bit into the forest that surrounds Bois-le-Roi and came upon these two stones, about a half mile apart:

What’s fascinating is that no one knows what they are, when they were placed there, nor why. The one of the left has “778” carved into it; the one on the right “777.” Maybe they marked the boundary of the forest, but no one knows. Gotta love a real-life mystery, don’t you? Mary says there are many of these markers in the area.

That’s a quick look at our current digs. We really like this town, a typical small French town; nothing special, really, but still…special to us.

We walked to the Chartrettes lock yesterday to see how things were progressing. Answer: getting better. The Seine is down by six-eight feet below the locks and much of the surrounding banks that were under a lot of water Saturday are now dry. Some comparisons:

This is looking at the locks last Saturday:

Yesterday we could actually see the locks. On Saturday, the areas along beside the lock and the grassy area were under about six inches of water.

Boaters enjoying new areas to explore Saturday:

Back to dry(-ish) ground yesterday:

We’re guessing another four or five days before the river barges start to operate again; the river is still running so fast that a barge would have a hard time. So many of them are holed up in St. Mammès, which is kind of the headquarters of the Seine River barges (pèniches).

The pèniches made it through the flood far better than did many residents of St. Mammès. The water level reached about five feet above ground level of the houses nearest the rivers (Seine and Loing). Today we saw many houses with piles of water-logged junk in front waiting to be hauled away.

We made it, safely and soundly! The flight over was fine: left on time, the meal was actually tasty (not unusual on Air France), we arrived on time, contacted the car-lease company without a problem, a van came to pick us up, the car was ready (bright red, our favorite color for a car), and the drive to Bois-le-Rois uneventful. The only hitch was arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport and seeing a loooooooooooooong line for passport control. I guessed it at 90 minutes, but then another section opened up and it was only 50 minutes. The most frustrating part: there were twenty stations available – two passport officer positions per station – and exactly half of them were staffed. This with way more than a thousand people in line and more arriving every minute. Oh, well, at least we knew we wouldn’t have to wait for our luggage.

Last week in New York we kept hearing disturbing news from France: strikers had closed six of eight refineries, so gas was not going to be available; the air traffic controllers were going on strike the weekend we were to travel, and the Seine was flooding. In the event, getting gas is no problem; the French government evidently bought-off the controllers, and the Seine didn’t quite flood Paris. But the river is the highest it’s been in decades, and many up-river towns are, indeed, underwater. We crossed the Seine in Melun and could not believe how high it was.

So after a fine “welcome back” breakfast chez Germain, we walked down to the locks on the Seine at Chartrettes. We’ve seen the river high, but this was jaw-dropping.

The lock requires a dam that generally lowers the river about 12-15 feet between the levels above and below the lock. Saturday there was no drop, at all. Below, you see water running out of the main lock at Chartrettes.

Below, looking upstream from a bridge across the lock. Normally, the area from the right side to the fence along the left is above water; the level in the lock at its highest is about five feet below what you see here. The locks are, of course, not operating and the water is flowing over the lock gates at both ends.

The Seine here flows at about 2-3 miles per hour normally. Saturday I estimated it at about 15 miles per hour. So what you have is a river fifteen feet above normal level, traveling five times faster than normal, flooding banks on both sides, heading toward Paris, where it will join the Marne river – not as high, but way above normal – and enter Paris, where the Seine narrows to about two-thirds the width you see here. In Paris, the Seine peaked at about 20 feet above normal, flooding all the quai’s and closing the Louvre and d’Orsay museums, which are both next to the river. I saw a photo of the main floor of the d’Orsay, with about two feet of water in it.

In the beautiful town of Samois-sur-Seine, where some people probably wished that the “sur-Seine” part of the name wasn’t so literal:

Sometimes river-front property is not so great…

But the boaters enjoyed exploring what is usually dry ground:

The strongest impression of all this is just how freaking powerful water is when it’s out of control. Nothing anyone could do was going to slow this river down or keep it from damaging whatever was in its way. Amazing.

Fortunately, the rains have stopped and the river level is dropping. Sunday we walked to the locks and saw that the level was down about a foot or foot and a half. Still, it will be days before the river traffic can start again; there’s no way a river barge could go up this river, and going down it would be out of control and at the mercy of the currents most of the time. Our péniche-watching will have to wait a week or so.

Anyway, we are glad to be back in France!