Unexcused Absences

September 13 – 22, 2017. This post is going to overlap with my “Paris, part 3” post chronologically, but so much happened our final 10 days in Paris that I need to break it into two entries. Even though Paris is famous for its art museums, it also has several opportunities for techno-geeks like me – hence the main theme of this post.

The Musée des Arts et Metiers (roughly, “Arts and Trades”), is a world-class industrial design museum. It covers building materials (wood, stone, concrete, iron), technology (printing, cameras, film and video, computers), and the history of scientific instruments. I loved it so much I went twice, and could have gone a third day if we’d had more time. A few of its many claims to fame are that it contains an original Foucault’s Pendulum, the original model of the Statue of Liberty, and Pascal’s first mechanical calculator, among its 2500 objects on display.

Original model for the Statue of Liberty

A very old biplane

One of the first televisions

Vintage magnetic storage media at the Arts and Trades Museum

France is pretty serious about its heritage, and in mid September the entire country participates in Les Journées du Patrimoine (heritage days). Museums offer free admission, private chateaux open their doors, and special events are scheduled. We stumbled upon a museum open to the public only one weekend a year, the Memoire de l’Électricité, du Gaz, et de l’Éclairage Publique (a museum of electricity, gas, and public lighting, acronym “MEGE”), which is run by volunteers who are mostly retired public utilities employees. We called to reserve two places, and when we were arrived the folks were somewhat surprised to have a couple of tourists in their midst. They claimed that we were the very first Americans to visit their museum.

An enormous insulator at MEGE

Electric meters

Electric grid gauges and switches

The building is an old electric sub-station that’s been re-purposed into a three-story display case of historical electrical/gas/lighting artifacts. The lighting section has streetlights, traffic signals (including the network of relays and timers that make everything work), and spotlights for public buildings and monuments (including the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower).

An early natural gas pipe

The oldest gas meter, 1856

Power grid connectors at MEGE

The electrical section has transformers, switches, volt- and ampere- meters, and an example of every single household electric meter ever used in France.

Street and traffic lights

A coin-op gas meter

The gas pipe display

Industrial light bulbs at MEGE

The gas section has original gas streetlights, burners, and its own complete collection of gas meters, including several from the 19th century that were coin-operated. An interesting display shows the four types of gas pipes used to move natural gas around the city; hollow logs (believe it or not), terra-cotta, cast iron, and modern polyethylene (plastic).

Our final tech-related visit during heritage days was to the Paris sewer system. This is not to be confused with the Paris Catacombs, where the bones of millions of former Parisians are stacked in vast underground chambers on the south side of the Seine River. This was a tour of the actual sewer system, and yes, it was as pungent as one would expect. It was fascinating in its own way, with ancient and modern infrastructure all connected together.

A sewer tunnel under Paris

Sewer remnants from the Napoleon III era

Modern Paris sewer infrastructure

The most interesting thing, to me, was the giant metal ball they use to clear the pipes of blockages. When it’s time to clean out the system, especially the lines that run under the Seine River (which first dip down under the river, then up to the other side, thus trapping sand and heavy debris at the lowest point of the line), workers drop a ~5 foot diameter ball into the line. It just about fills the pipe, with only a few inches or to spare. The water pushes the ball along; when it comes to an obstruction, the force of the water creates a jet that shoots forward between the ball and the pipe wall. This jet blasts away any debris, which then allows the ball to move forward until it comes up against the next blockage. A magnificent achievement in engineering simplicity.

The giant cleaning ball

Next post I’ll cover the same time period, and will talk about normal Paris tourist things. But if you get the chance, you should indeed visit the lesser-known “tech” museums of Paris.

An early telegraph and keyboard

A Cray supercomputer

A 1-cylinder Diesel engine

Early standards for volumes and measures

A selection of early 20th century cameras

A printing press

The first-ever self-propelled steam engine

September 4-12, 2017. Our first order of business after arriving in Paris was to pick up Dad, who was flying in the following morning. Well, actually, our FIRST order of business was to visit our favorite boulangerie and buy one of their magnificent baguettes for happy hour, then walk around the port to see who was there that we knew, THEN think about picking up Dad.

He arrived on schedule, without a hitch, and we immediately set out on Après Ski for a Seine River cruise. Because it was summer in Paris, we had to wear cold-weather jackets. We cruised from the Arsenal Marina (next to Place de la Bastille) downstream to the “other” Statue of Liberty (technically named “Liberty Enlightening the World”), a replica statue given by the American community in Paris to the French in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

The “other” Statue of Liberty

Cruising the Seine on “Après Ski”

Houseboats near Tuileries Garden

After our first full day in Paris, the weather turned decidedly un-summer-like, so we purchased annual passes to the Louvre and proceeded to visit 7 times over the following three weeks. A few days after Dad’s arrival we had a brief visit from our friends Jeff and Roger. Most of our time with Dad was spent visiting art museums in addition to the Louvre (Musée d’Orsay, Musée National du Moyen Age, Musée de l’Orangerie), unsurprising since Dad has several art-related degrees, but I also dragged him to the Paris Air and Space Museum, which is much more my style.

The “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestry at Moyen Age

In particular, at the Louvre, in addition to visiting the standard galleries of paintings and sculptures, we visited the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian sections, and saw some surprisingly interesting things, given that the main attractions of the Louvre (at least from the casual tourist perspective) are the painting and sculpture halls.

A sketch by Cézanne

Paul Cézanne self-portrait

The old Paris Opera

A sales contract for a house on papyrus from ~150 BC

We rented a car for a day and drove out to Meaux to visit the brie factory and to tour the very nice WWI museum outside of town. At the brie factory we learned the essential difference between brie de Meaux and brie de Melun; brie de Meaux curds are scooped out of the vat with a perforated shovel, whereas brie de Melun curds are scooped out of the vat with a ladle (or maybe it was the other way around). And of course brie de Melun can only be made with milk from cows that graze in the greater commune of Melun, which sits inside (and completely surrounded by) the brie de Meaux AOC designated area. Only in France.

Brie de Melun scoop on the left, Meaux on the right

Brie wheels during “affinage” (aging)

Allied recruiting poster for WWI

The difficulty of understanding the subtleties of brie-related manufacturing rules aside, we greatly enjoyed our visit to Meaux. Back in Paris, we enjoyed Dad’s company a couple more days, then packed him off to the airport and returned to the grueling social schedule of the Paris Arsenal marina.

There will be several more posts on our Paris visit, but it is necessary to split them up since so much can happen in 3 weeks.

The Louvre

Fishermen on the Seine

The Arsenal Marina at night

A city street near Gare de Lyon

Paris Air and Space Museum

The cramped cockpit of the Concorde

Cruising on the Seine

Jesus as carpenter’s apprentice

Demons at St Denis

St Denis the not-quite-finished

A carving inside St Denis cathedral

“Un coin de table” by the great still-life painter Fantin-Latour

September 4 to September 11, 2016. Our time in Clamecy was way too brief, since we needed to get back to Auxerre to meet my Dad and put the boat away for the winter. We had a terrific visit with Luc, who owns the Caves du Val d’Or wine shop. We’ve been buying wine from Luc for years, although we missed a couple years when Après Ski was wintered in Lorraine.

Moored near Mailly-le-Chateau

The highlight of our half-week cruise back to Auxerre was a Wednesday night picnic dinner with some of our French friends. We parked for an evening at the end of the branch canal at Vermenton, and Marianne and Jean-Pierre drove up from Dijon (in the middle of packing up for their move to the Riviera). Marianne’s daughter, Justine, and her boyfriend, Alexandre, who live nearby, also joined us. We had a lot of fun catching up, but time ran out as darkness descended, and we had to pack up our picnic by flashlight.

Picnic with our very good friends

The next day we stopped for lunch in Accolay where we visited one of our favorite restaurants in France, the family-run Hostellerie de la Fontaine. It was the owner, during our charter boat trip on the Nivernais before we purchased our canal boat, who first introduced us to the king of cheeses, Epoisses. He was quite amused when we showed him a picture of his “cheese chariot” from our visit in 2009.

A manual lock mechanism on the Nivernais Canal

We spent Thursday night tied up just outside of Auxerre on the edge of an enormous park. The local running club showed up in the late afternoon and did a big stretching session followed by several laps around the park and through town. It was all very exhausting to watch.

The Auxerre running club

Once tied up in Auxerre we started our well-tested shutdown procedure; do all the laundry, winterize the engine and boat systems, pack all the clothes and linens in giant plastic zip-lock bags, and clear out the fridge and pantry with multiple meals of “left-over surprise”. One thing out of the ordinary was a Saturday afternoon gathering of vintage Volkswagen cars that took place in the field right next to our boat.

Lots and lots of Volkswagens

Dad arrived a couple days later, just as Après Ski was coming out of the water for her winter storage. The three of us drove south about 40 minutes to a cave near Arcy-sur-Cure (central Burgundy) that has the second oldest cave drawings in the world (and the oldest that can be visited by the public). They did not allow photos of the drawings (for obvious reasons) but they were remarkably clear, and we got a nice look at some 30,000-year-old cave art.

The cave itself has been a tourist attraction for over 100 years, but it was only in 1990 that the drawings were discovered, completely by accident. A TV crew had set up their lights inside the cave for an interview with a scientist, and one of the lights ended up pointed at the ceiling, and everyone there could suddenly see the faint drawings through the thin layer of calcite sediment that had covered the cave walls since the drawings were made.

The following day, at sunrise, the boatyard crew moved Après Ski to its final winter home inside their giant storage shed. It was hard to get over the sight of our boat moving slowly through the streets of Auxerre in the morning light. The driver expertly maneuvered our boat around the parked cars about a quarter mile to the shed.

Après Ski cruising down a street

Mid-morning the three of us drove 25 miles south-west from Auxerre to an interesting tourist attraction. About 15 years ago, someone started building a medieval castle in the French countryside, using traditional construction methods and tools. The combination paid and volunteer workforce is in the process of creating quite a masterpiece. The reasonable entrance fee pays for materials and salaries, and the whole thing is quite fascinating to watch. It’s pretty remote from anywhere, but if you find yourself in western Burgundy you should definitely plan at least a half day to see Château Guédelon.

A craftsman at Guédelon

Stone masons

Dyed yarn

The partially finished château

From the new/old castle we continued westward and spent the night in Amboise on the lower Loire River. Amboise is famous for a number of reasons. Over the centuries, Joan of Arc passed through on her way to Orleans, Mary Stewart (Queen of Scots) lived there for much of her early life, the chateau was home to the French royal court for a number of years, and none other than Leonardo da Vinci spent the last years of his life (and died) in town.

The next morning we visited the famous “ladies’ castle”, Château de Chenonceau. The castle was built over the river Cher and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in France. It was originally built by the Marques family in the 13th century and re-built 200 years later by Thomas Bohier, but afterwards was owned by Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, Louise de Lorraine, Louise Dupin, and Margerite Pelouze (hence the “ladies’ castle” nickname). It is a strikingly beautiful building.

The gardens at Chenonceau

The “new” building and the old keep

The chateau spands the river Cher

After Chenonceau we drove a few hours westward to Nort-sur-Erdre, in Brittany, to rent (of all things) a canal boat with some friends. Details of that trip will follow in another post.

France 2016 Cruise – Week 9

• Engine Hours: 14
• Kilometers: 59
• Locks: 31
• Moorings: 13.40 Euros

France 2016 Cruise – Total

• Engine Hours: 146
• Kilometers: 782
• Locks: 248
• Moorings: 364.50 Euros

All-Time Europe Cruising Numbers (73 weeks over 6 seasons)

• Engine Hours: 1,281
• Kilometers: 6,376
• Locks: 2,168
• Moorings: 2,014.60 Euros

France 2016 – Week 9 Route

The church in Accolay

Winterizing the engine

Heather’s “galley view” in Auxerre

Arriving in Auxerre from the Nivernais Canal

Billboard for excercise equipment; “Change Buttocks”

A statue in Mailly-la-Ville

Après Ski parked in Auxerre

Après Ski leaving the waterfront…

… and entering the storage shed

The Auxerre running club warms up

The great hall at Chenonceau

Craftsmen at Guédelon

The Auxerre skyline at night

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

• Engine Hours: 36
• Kilometers: 183
• Locks: 59
• Moorings: 6 Euros

France 2016 Cruise – Total

• Engine Hours: 132
• Kilometers: 723
• Locks: 217
• Moorings: 351.10 Euros

France 2016 – Week 8 Route

A hilltop chapel along the Yonne

The town of Joigny

An old cast iron sign on a lock-keeper’s house

August 21 to August 27, 2016. Where to begin? Paris is so amazing, and during our 8 days parked at the Arsenal marina we literally just scratched the surface. As I mentioned last week, the Port de Plaisance de l’Arsenal marina, where Après Ski was parked, is à côté de (next to) la Place de la Bastille, very convenient to numerous metro and bus lines. It gave us excellent access to everything Paris has to offer.

The Seine River in Paris

Sunday morning we met someone from Paris Greeters, a volunteer organization that pairs native Parisians with visitors to give a real sense of the place, not just a quick Louvre/Eiffel Tower/Notre Dame look at this incredible city. We wanted to get a closer look, from a local’s perspective, of the Marais, the area north of Île de la Cité. Our guide grew up in the Marais in the 1960’s, so she had some interesting stories about how things used to be.

Section of old city wall in the Marais

Piece of the old Bastille foundation in the Metro

Tower at Place de la Bastille

Seine River and Notre Dame at dusk

The most interesting thing we discovered Sunday was on our own, after sunset. I had run down to the Seine to take some twilight photos, and heard music from across the river. It looked like there was quite a party going on, so I called Heather to join me and we crossed to la Rive Gauche (the left bank). Once there, we discovered a whole series of public dance parties, each with their own music (swing, classical, salsa, etc.) and each about 75 meters apart, along the banks of the Seine. In chatting with some locals, we discovered that pretty much every evening from mid June through mid September, someone brings a sound system and people gather at about sunset and dance until midnight or later. I challenge any other major city to have something this cool (and spontaneous).

Dance party on the banks of the Seine

Monday we took a half-hour subway ride north to Montmartre, a large hill to the north of the main Paris downtown. The area is of course famous for the snow-white basilica Sacré-Coeur (sacred heart), although arguably more interesting is the fact that the older church, Saint Pierre de Montmartre, claims to be where the Jesuit order of priests was founded.

Inside Sacre Coeur

Non-standard view of Sacre Coeur

The “standard” view of Sacre Coeur

The area is also famous as a major center of art during the Belle Époque (beautiful era), and at the turn of the 20th century counted, as residents, Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh, among many. While the south-west side is completely overrun by tourist shops and restaurants, just one block east of the basilica is a lovely, quiet street full of local restaurants, and we found a delicious crêperie suitable for a long lunch.

A classic French car in Paris

The next afternoon I took the subway and a bus line out to Le Bourget, home to the Paris Air and Space Museum. It’s not very well known, and was practically deserted when I went, but it’s really quite nice. They have two (!) Concordes, including one of ones used for the pre-production test flights, a full-sized Ariane 5 rocket, a Boeing 747, and an entire hangar full of trans-sonic and supersonic experimental aircraft from the 1950’s.

Paris Air and Space Museum

The Ariane 5 rocket and a 747

Experimental trans-sonic aircraft

Of particular interest to your correspondent was a mint-condition, World War II era C-47, the same aircraft that sits in about 6 feet of water at Norman’s Cay in the Exumas. We snorkeled this plane wreck back in late March during our Bahamas cruise earlier this year. The only real flaw with the museum was that for about half the aircraft on display, the sign only identifies the plane, but gives no other information. But, they’re in the middle of a multi-stage renovation, and the signs in the renovated sections are much more informative.

An atypical view of a 747

A VERY experimental jet aircraft

Experimental fighter planes from the 1950’s and 60’s

Back at the port, we shared a couple meals with a couple originally from Annapolis, Maryland, not far from Washington DC. They were originally sailors but “retired” from boating in the USA to live full-time on their canal boat in France.  We also took two pleasure cruises on the Seine River, one early in the morning (no tourist boat traffic!) and one at sunset (lots of tourist boat traffic). Our French friend Marine, who has spent a couple Christmases with us in Virginia, joined us for the dinner/sunset cruise.

Our morning cruise on the Seine

At the Tour Eiffel

Passing under Pont Alexandre III

On our evening cruise we noticed numerous people lingering on the banks of the Seine, either picnicking, or relaxing with friends, or both. One night we joined the fun and took a baguette, a slab of rabbit terrine, and some wine down to a stone quay on the right bank not far from Île St. Louis. We were both quite impressed to see how many young, friendly Parisians were taking the time to enjoy the outdoors in their beautiful city.

Dinner on the banks of the Seine

After 8 days in Paris it was time to move on, so we locked down out of the Port into the Seine, took one final scenic lap around Île St Louis and Île de la Cité, then pointed south (upstream) and cruised several hours to the waiting quai downstream of lock #9. From there it was a six hour drive to Melun, the biggest town on the upper Seine River.

Notre Dame towers at night

Notre Dame towers at twilight

Returning to the Arsenal marina from our evening cruise

Melun’s main claim to fame was as a stopover on the Roman road south-southeast of Paris, used to provide fresh horses to official couriers. Nine hundred years later the town became home to the Capetian kings. At this point we are attempting to cover serious distance, and are not lingering very long in any one spot, although we did take time to visit the very nice street market and covered market before continuing our cruise, so I’ll pick up the narrative again in my next post.

France 2016 Cruise – Week 7

• Engine Hours: 14
• Kilometers: 84
• Locks: 7
• Moorings:  91.8 Euros

France 2016 Cruise – Total

• Engine Hours: 96
• Kilometers: 540
• Locks: 158
• Moorings: 345.1 Euros

France 2016 – Week 7 Route

A factory on the Seine south of Paris

An innovative car parking arrangement

A colorful cargo barge

Église St-Paul in Paris

Candles in Sacre Coeur

The Conciergerie in Paris

La Tour Eiffel

An iron bridge over the Seine

Another Paris bridge

One of the earliest jet fighters, a Heinkel He 162

Douglas C-47 like the one at Norman’s Cay

The pilot sits inside the intake to this experimental ram-jet aircraft

An innovative way to wash your dock

Seen at a wine shop; “My favorite weapon is a corkscrew”

A cargo barge barely squeezes under a bridge at Melun