Unexcused Absences France 2016 - Week 8 (he said)

France 2016 – Week 8 (he said)

by Kent 5 Sep 2016

August 28 to September 3, 2016. For a week that was supposed to cover as much distance as possible, and it was the most we’ve ever traveled in one week, we still saw some lovely scenery and took time to meet a few fellow boaters.

The tiny town of Champagne-sur-Seine, where we spent Saturday night, clearly has a fun streak. In this village I saw two excellent business names; the first was a hair salon named “Coupe de Champagne” (coupe translates as either “cup” or “cut), and the second was a bakery called “Champ Pain” (field of bread in French).

Commercial barges docked in St. Mammes

From Champagne we took a longgggg day’s cruise further up the Seine, past the commercial barge port of St Mammes, to Pont-sur-Yonne. The town has free floating docks for passing boaters, but the one restaurant in town was closed, naturally, on Sunday evening.

The lower Yonne River

Monday we continued upstream (south) to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. It’s a very old village with a pretty waterfront park and a beautiful view across the Yonne River. We met a Swiss couple on their boat, and what made it particularly memorable was that the wife was a wine distributor, so she insisted that we come over to try three different Champagnes she was evaluating. Well, ok, but only because she asked nicely.

The bridge at Villeneuve

On the way to Villeneuve we stopped in Sens to visit the terrific weekly market. A thousand years ago Sens was a town of enormous power. About eight hundred years ago the Cathedral (more it in a minute) hosted the wedding of Saint Louis (King Louis IX) and Marguerite de Provence. The cathedral also hosts the crypt of the parents of the last three kings of France. At the height of its influence, Sens was the seat of a province that included Chartres, Auxerre, Meaux, Paris, Orleans, Nevers, and Troyes. There are those who claim the Archbishop was second in power only to the Pope. Unfortunately for Sens, the Archbishopric of Paris was created in 1622, robbing the local Cathedral of its power.

A very fine cheese indeed

Fish vendor at the market

Some ironwork in the Sens market

The Cathedral itself has quite a story to tell. In 1130, Archbishop Henri Sanglier decided to scrap the existing church and construct a magnificent building using the latest architectural techniques. Although the Romanesque style was still very much the norm, he used a new technique, the ribbed vault, plus another modern marvel, the flying buttress, in his design. While the individual styles had been used elsewhere, locals claim this was the first time they were put together all in the same building. Thus, Sens claims theirs was the very first true Gothic Cathedral, although the Basilica of Saint Denis is generally regarded by historians as the first. Unfortunately, the designer of the Sens Cathedral is on the way to being lost to history; the Wikipedia entry for Gothic Architecture doesn’t mention Sens at all, although the book “French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries” contains a nice description of his innovations.

The Sens Cathedral and weekly street market

The next day we did another long cruise, past the entrance to the Burgundy Canal at Migennes, and tied up outside a small, family-run outdoor restaurant in Moneteau, on the outskirts of Auxerre. A small group invited us to their table for an afternoon, and we had a fun chat with a French local guy, whose parents were from the middle east, plus a local French woman and her colleague, originally from Morocco. They all loved to travel, so we talked about fun places we’ve been and they were curious to hear all about America and the orange guy running for President.

Moneteau in the morning

From Moneteau we made a brief stop in Auxerre to meet the folks who will be keeping Après Ski safe over the winter, then continued south into the northern Nivernais Canal and parked for the evening below the Caves de Bailly. We’ve stopped here numerous times over the years, so I won’t bore you with details, but the Caves are a local cooperative that produces Crémant de Bourgogne (bubbly wine from Burgundy) using the methode traditionnelle de Champagne even though they can’t call it “Champagne”.

Entering the Nivernais south of Auxerre

From Bailly it was four hour cruise to Mailly-la-Ville, a small village with three nice floating docks for visiting boaters. We took a jog (Heather) and a bike ride (me) in the afternoon, then settled in to organize our wine cave in preparation for our visit to our favorite caviste (wine merchant), Luc, one long or two short days away in Clamecy.

Clamecy’s old quarter

Clamecy is one of our favorite towns in France, and we have visited at least three times by boat and twice by car. The old village perches on a hilltop, with narrow alleyways and staircases leading to the main square, and the new village spreads around three sides of the hill and ridge, crisscrossed with a number of small streams and waterways.

Clamecy was famous two centuries ago as the gateway to the Morvan, a heavily wooded area in central Burgundy that provided firewood for early 19th century Paris. The loggers would dump their cuttings into the Yonne River, and teams would assemble the wood into giant rafts in Clamecy, above the dam. Once the rafts and the “navigators” were ready, they would release the floodgates and the whole assembly would careen down the Yonne, hopefully making it to the navigable part of the river downstream of Auxerre before the water levels returned to normal. This system of navigation had mixed results.

The Nivernais Canal near Clamecy

In the mid 19th century work began on a series of locks and canals with the purpose of creating a proper waterway to Paris, right about the time that the city switched to coal for heating. The canal saw some minor use for cargo boats carrying cattle or wine, but by the mid 20th century the canal was abandoned. An enterprising Australian (Ted Johnson, who still lives nearby and runs a boating supply business out of his house) and his buddies took a small boat through the Nivernais Canal in the early 1960’s, hacking and chopping their way through the weeds and the overgrowth, and supposedly made it to the summit pound in Baye. They opened a couple of boat rental bases nearby, sold one-way cruises to the British, and thus was borne the concept of pleasure cruises on the canals of France. At least according to Ted.

France 2016 Cruise – Week 8