Unexcused Absences France 2015 - Week 6 Recap (he said)

France 2015 – Week 6 Recap (he said)

by Kent 28 Jul 2015

Sunday morning we waited until the bread truck arrived (Millery is too small to have a boulangerie) and then continued south (upstream) on the Moselle to Toul, a town we last visited in September, 2014. It was a long day, seven hours of cruising, but the weather was nice.

Moored in Sillery

At Toul, we pulled out of the last lock and found ourselves right in the middle of a waterfront festival. The town was having its annual water-jousting competition, where two teams of 6 go after each other on rowboats. Four people paddle, one steers, and one stands on a tower wearing a big styrofoam square on their chest, and carrying a long jousting lance with a ball at the end. The boats/horses “charge” at each other, and the victim/knight attempts to knock the other victim/knight off their tower by poking the big square with their jousting pole.

A water-jousting boat

As I was jockeying Après Ski around to miss the rowboats, swimmers, and docked cruising boats, we got a wave from our friend Peter, who owns Joyeux with his wife Jo. They too winter in Lagarde, where Après Ski spent last winter and where she’ll spend this winter, but they started their cruise before we arrived in France, so we missed them in the spring. We hosted happy hour because believe it or not, we actually have more space on our back deck than they do. And anyone who’s seen our boat in person knows that’s a bit surprising. It was very nice to finally catch up with this friendly Australian couple this year.

Charge…

…and, contact…

…and SPLASH

That evening we also met our boat neighbors Brian and Stephanie. They are interesting in many ways; several years ago they purchased a small sailboat (Rode Trip) and have cruised the US east coast, Bahamas, and Caribbean. They recently sold that boat, flew to the south of France, and bought a bigger sailboat (Detour) with plans to cruise the French Canals (where we met them), then continue to Ireland and Norway, before crossing the Atlantic back to the Caribbean. Oh, and they’ve only just turned 30. You can follow their current adventure here, sailingdetour.com, and their one with the smaller boat at rodetrip.net.

Canal port in Toul

Monday our friend Jen arrived from Japan by way of south-east Asia and England. She just finished up a year of work in Japan and is taking the long way home to the USA. We stayed in Toul and wandered the town and stocked up on cheese and bread, because Japan had neither and Jen was pretty desperate to sample the delicious French specialties.

Remember, Après Ski has no air conditioning

Eye-candy for the girls (the half-naked boys, not the fish)

Tuesday we dropped back into the Moselle and continued south, stopping at a pontoon in Maron. The temperature was back on the bad end of the thermometer, and dozens of locals (mostly athletic boys aged 16-22) were out swimming off the docks. Heather and Jen tried to be discreet with their gawking, but they really weren’t fooling anybody. Several of the boys spoke pretty good English, and they were most curious to hear about America, particularly about the states that have legalized marijuana. Heather and Jen were only too happy to hang out and chat. After the show dispersed, we cooked up some pork on our grill and then gazed at the stars and watched satellites fly overhead (we counted 11 in about an hour).

Heather jumps,

and tucks (scoring six out of six)

before meeting the refreshing Moselle River

Wednesday we left the Moselle River and entered the Canal des Vosges, which parallels the Moselle (and which at this point is too small and shallow for boat traffic) all the way to Épinal. We found some shady rural parking at Roville-devant-Bayon, about one km south of a big grain silo. The activity was continuous since the wheat in France is now ready for harvest, and tractor after tractor arrived towing large hoppers full of grain.

The final big commercial port on the Moselle

Thursday we found more shade, along a nice quai with bollards and picnic tables, in Nomexy. On the way, we stopped for lunch in Charmes to fill up our water tank and visit the town. Charmes has not had a very charmed existence; the town has been ravaged by plagues, famines, wars, and fire over the centuries. It was devastated by illness in the 14th century, by Charles le Téméraire in the 15th, by famine in the 17th, then by the French who destroyed the town in the 18th. The Franco-Prussian, WWI, and WWII all had action in the town. And finally, a fire set in 1944 by the retreating Nazis burned much of it to the ground.

Jen and Heather drive across a canal bridge

Friday morning, across the river from Nomexy in the sister town of Châtel-sur-Moselle, we discovered a large medieval castle that’s currently under excavation and renovation. I say “excavation” because Louis XIV, after sacking the castle in 1670, ordered it destroyed and buried. And I say “discovered” because our guidebook didn’t even mention this amazing site.

The excavated castle walls in Châtel-sur-Moselle

The castle dates from the 12th century, and it would take a small book to describe the complex details of its history. The short version is that the castle sat at the junction of three main Roman roads and at the end of the Trans-Burgundy highway. Early on it belonged to the Earls of Vaudémont, part of the House of Lorraine. The inner wall was built during the 12th and 13th centuries, and was relatively thin. In the 15th century an outer wall was constructed to withstand the technological advance of modern artillery. The walls included 21 towers, and a complex network of underground storerooms and galleries allowed it to withstand repeated attacks – nine alone during the 30-years war.

An early example of light artillery

Touring the depths of the castle

Nice restoration after being buried ~400 years

Stone cannonballs in the armory

After the castle was buried in 1670, a number of buildings were constructed on the site, including convents, churches, and amazingly, two mid-rise apartment blocks in the late 1960’s, with additional ones planned. Fortunately, someone suggested that the castle might be worth saving, so construction was halted and work was begun in 1972 to clear the rubble and excavate the remains of the castle. To date, some 135,000 tons of material has been hauled away, mostly by teams of volunteers who descend on the site each summer. The town now runs very interesting guided tours, and we were able to explore the networks of underground galleries and passages. An amazing place to visit, considering it’s not in the guidebook.

Back in the small locks of the Vosges Canal after a month in the big river locks

Friday, after our morning tour of the castle, we returned to Nomexy to find our dear friends Marie-Helene and Christian had arrived with their boat Wisdom, and were planning to stay a couple days. We originally had hoped to continue south Friday, but immediately decided to stay and have a pot-luck dinner. We first met this nice French couple back in the fall of 2011, when we shared a rainy day of cruising on the Briare Canal with them. We’ve seen them several times since, including in the middle of last year’s cruise, and we were very glad to see them again, and happy too that Jen could meet them. Since we were running low on electricity, Christian very kindly fired up his groupe electrique (generator) and we plugged into Wisdom for a couple hours to recharge our batteries.

Us with Marie-Helene and Christian

We hoped to visit Épinal Saturday with Jen, but Christian told us that the VNF had closed the branch canal into the town port due to lack of water, so we had to stop short in the suburb of Thaon-les-Vosges. It turned out to be OK, because there were two large supermarché at either end of town, and we scored delicious take-out pizza from Au Comptoir à Pizza for dinner. And we were able to take a short train ride into Épinal and stroll the town and the old fort and church, despite the port closure, so in the end we got to see what we wanted.

Church in Épinal

Finally, as if the week couldn’t get better, Heather was chatting with our boat neighbors early Saturday evening, and they invited us over for apéritif (happy hour) on their boat Ventenpoupe, where we met Gilbert & Danielle (the owners) plus Annie & Jacques and Laure & Sylvain (their guests – and maybe I got the couples wrong). This was a rare group of French folk enjoying their own waterways – as I’ve mentioned before, most of the plaisanciers (pleasure boaters) in France are anglophone. They were a fun group, and several of them spoke very good English, so Jen wasn’t completely in the dark, and then they decided it was time for music, so Annie pulled out her violin, Jacques his accordion, and Sylvain his guitar and flute.

Jacques and Sylvain (and Annie’s left hand)

They sang some French songs and a couple of American folk songs (Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel) and then they asked us to sing some American songs that we like. Well, first off, we don’t sing. I mean, we really don’t sing. The world is a much better place if I don’t share my entire three-note range with it. And second, while we love music, and have close to 100 GB of music in our iTunes collection, none of it is suitable for playing in a sing-along setting. They insisted that we have to have some songs we can like, but how do you tell the nice group of older French couples who love traditional folk songs that our musical tastes run more towards Metallica and Nine Inch Nails (and even Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, the big Hawaiian buggah who did that terrific cover of “Over the Rainbow”) than Woody Guthrie? Anyway, they were very good sports about us not being very good sports, and we ended up sharing a lovely and memorable Saturday evening.

Week 6 Numbers