Unexcused Absences

September 13 – October 7, 2017 – Paris to Auxerre. In parallel with all the tech museums, we found time to socialize at the port, take lots of walks around Paris, and visit St Denis Cathedral. St Denis is famous for having most of the kings of France buried in its choir (your “A”-listers) or down in the crypt (the rest). The list runs almost uninterrupted from Clovis I (in the early 6th century) to Louis XVIII (1824).

Interestingly, the stone statues that decorate the sarcophagi bear no resemblance at all to the actual kings and queens whom they represent. Because it was not a practice to paint likenesses until the 15th or so century, no one actually knew what the early monarchs looked like, certainly not the artist called in to sculpt the effigy. Thus, the carving of “Louis the Fat” looks almost exactly like that of “Pepin the Short”.

Some of the many sarcophagi at St Denis

St Denis city hall

Overflow “dead VIP storage” in the St Denis crypt

One other first-time Paris activity for us was visiting the Cligancourt flea market. This is the Mount Rushmore of flea markets; covering about 18 acres, with over 3,000 vendors, the Marché aus Puces is considered the largest flea market in the world. It is ludicrously big, and you can buy almost anything there. We found an entire shop devoted to lapel pins. Another shop was filled with vintage pinball machines, and yet another was all antique nautical stuff.

Vintage pinball machines for sale

Notre Dame

Pont Alexandre III

On our last full day we helped a friend move her 45-ton barge ten hours down-river to her winter parking place, then spent the night onboard and took the RER (suburban train system) back to Paris. Our cruise back to Burgundy for our winter parking went without incident, and ended the summer with only 74 more hours on the engine. In a normal cruising season, we spend twice as much time moving the boat, but this year’s combination of a short time in country plus spending three weeks parked in Paris means we’ll need to do some extra cruising next year to make up for lost ground.

Our friend’s barge in Cergy

Stained glass in St Denis

Sacre Coeur

Our home for 3 weeks, the Port de Plaisance de Paris

Once we had the boat put away in Auxerre, we rented a car and did some touring to visit friends and wineries (not necessarily in that order). On the “friends” front, we drove to southern Burgundy and visited our friends Lynn and Ron, who live most of the year in France, but who recently came over to the dark side and bought a powerboat that they use in the winter, cruising the south-east USA. We also hiked to La Roche de Solutré, an escarpment that hangs over the wine-growing area of Pouilly-Fuissé.

La Roche de Salutré

Grapes at the Chateau de Rully

At the top of the hike

Wine-wise, we visited several small Burgundy producers, but the standout, by far, was Domaine d’Ardhuy, which owns 42 separate plots all around the Côte d’Or. The taste of their various wines ranges from outstanding to exquisite, and, incredibly, they let us taste a Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru (pe. They have plots in some of the most famous names in wine, including the aforementioned Corton-Charlemagne, plus Clos de Vougeot, Puligny-Montrachet, Pommard, Vosne Romanée, and Gevrey-Chambertin. We of course bought some (of the less costly but still amazing Meursault) to bring home to our special stash, to the dismay of our wallets.

Grapes in Fixin

Tasting at Domaine d’Ardhuy

Vines near Beaune

Autumn vines in Fixin, northern Côte d’Or

A final stop on our way back to Auxerre was to visit the Château de Savigny-lès-Beaune. If you click this link you’ll see why this is no ordinary, “I’ve seen 30 French chateaux before” kind if place: (https://goo.gl/maps/w8YfqaaVhHQ2). It should come up in satellite view, and looking south from the chateau itself, in the top-center of the image, you’ll see what I mean.

The owner is a collector, about whom serious collectors say, “wow, he has quite a collection.” Sure, he has the standard warehouse full of race cars, motorcycles, even a nice collection of fire engines, plus an entire floor of the chateau devoted to model cars. But the real attraction is his 98 (!) fighter planes (mostly jets, plus a few helicopters) from around the world. He has an almost complete collection of Soviet MIG aircraft, plus every variant of the French Mirage fighter, plus Italian, German, and American planes. In the courtyard in front of the main door, pride-of-place (so to speak), he has an American F-16, a Mirage III, and an F-104 Starfighter.

Fire engine collection at Savigny-les-Beaune

Soviet Sukhoi SU-20 fighter jet

Acres of fighter planes amid the vines

Even if you have no interest in military aircraft, you still need to see, in person, his acres of relatively modern fighter aircraft, in among the vineyards of Savigny. It makes for quite a strange combination.

Part of the Mirage collection

Next up, our final week in France, where we visit our friends Marianne and Jean-Pierre, formerly of Dijon, who now live on the Med coast not far from St. Tropez.

Paris Metro sign, V1

Paris Metro sign, V2

Paris Metro sign, V3

Visiting our friends Guillaume and Marine in Paris

Cupola of the Grand Palais

Paris city hall

Eglise de Notre Dame

Chapelle St Juline-de-Vauguillain

“Après Ski” moored in Montereau-faut-Yonne

The entrance to Chateau Sauvigny

Rainbow (and lots of starlings) in Auxerre

A private chateau north of Cluny

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

August 26, 2017 to September 4, 2017 – Auxerre to Paris. First, a warm thank-you to concerned readers who wrote asking if we were OK – we are fine, just busy. Apparently, too busy having fun to write about having fun in France. So the recaps of our summer 2017 canal cruise in France are clearly late. We’ve been busy, although I can’t figure out why. We only have two boats and multiple places we live during the year. Anyway.

Since it’s now spring, and we’re back from a six week skiing trip to Europe (and in fact are at anchor in the Bahamas on our other boat as I type), this will simply be a placeholder post that will (hopefully) be followed up with actual stories and pics from our trip. The “Reader’s Digest Condensed Version” is that we only had 6 weeks in France, so we picked up our boat in Auxerre (north-west Burgundy), cruised 5 straight days to Paris, and spent the following 22 days moored at the Paris Arsenal marina.

“Après Ski” coming out of her winter storage shed

We didn’t have a chance to linger much on our way downstream to Paris, but we did enjoy overnight stops in Sens, Moret-sur-Loing, and Melun. A few highlights were a visit to what we in America would call a country fair (near Auxerre), a street market in Moret-sur-Loing followed by a stroll around town where we watched two swans enjoying the waterfowl equivalent of a bubble bath below a small weir, and a visit to the Vaux-le-Vicomte chateau “candlelit evening” outside of Melun. Every Saturday evening during the summer the chateau lights over 2000 candles in the windows and around the gardens, and invites the public to visit for 20 euros. We had beautiful clear skies that night and it was just by chance that we were parked in Melun on the one day per week this was available.

On the river outside of Moret-sur-Loing

I’ll have much more to talk about in future posts about our 22-day stay in Paris. Hopefully it won’t be another 4 months until I get a chance to actually write about it.

Not just America that does mechanical bull-riding

Tractor show at the “county fair”

Cruising downstream at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne

Mill-house in Moret-sur-Loing

Cathedral in Sens

Wood carving on a house

Swans taking a bubble bath in Moret-sur-Loing

Vaux-le-Vicomte before the candle-lighting

Night settling on the chateau

Full moon over Vaux-le-Vicomte

Street market in Moret

One flood per century in Moret

The beautiful, but flood-prone, Moret-sur-Loing

Vaux-le-Vicomte “Candlelit Evening”

The American West, mid-August, 2017 – I’ve been anticipating the arrival of the Great American Solar Eclipse since about the moment we saw our first total eclipse in Turkey over 10 years ago. The laws of physics prevailed (as if there was any doubt), and it finally arrived.

My first task was to identify the spot along the line of totality that would have the highest odds of clear skies. All factors (time of day, season, historical cloud cover) tended to converge over an area from eastern Oregon, through south/central Idaho, and into west/central Wyoming. Luckily, we could combine this with a visit to Heather’s Dad and his wife in Montana, plus a rendezvous in Idaho with our friends Brian and Susan, whom we met in the Bahamas during our 2016 cruise. We even got a quick flyby visit from my cousin and her husband who live in Calgary.

The gang at the RV park in Dillon, MT

The plan was to rent an RV (thank you, Heather’s Dad!) and camp about an hour north of the eclipse centerline for a couple nights. We targeted the area north of Idaho Falls, Idaho, as our ideal viewing spot. This would (hopefully) put us in clear skies on the opposite side of the centerline from the large population centers of Utah, Nevada, and California. The last way we wanted to spend the eclipse was sitting in traffic outside the zone of totality.

A preview of totality

Note:  Animation shot with my Panasonic Lumix and converted with ezgif.com.

Before the eclipse itself, we spent the night at a hot springs and campground in southern Montana, and the following day exploring the old mining towns of Virginia City and Nevada City. Saturday evening we met up with Brian and Susan at the RV park in Dillon, Montana, and it was just like old times anchored in the Bahamas, except that we were on solid ground and there wasn’t some mechanical system on one of our boats in the process of breaking.

Bluegrass band at the hot springs

Old tracks in Virginia City

Very old steam engine at Nevada City

The following day we visited the ghost town at Bannack State Park. This is a 5-star place to visit; you can wander through the town and explore the old buildings, plus at noon every day they have a guided tour of the gold-mine ore-processing facility that was the whole reason for the town in the first place.

The Bannock ghost town

An old wagon on the edge of town

Abandoned mineworks at Bannock Park

On eclipse day we drove south and found parking without incident, with plenty of time to get situated. We had a terrific viewing spot at the base of the Menan Butte trail. As the moon began to cover the sun, the light dimmed – but not like at sunset, where everything gets an orange tint. With the sun high in the sky, the color cast remained neutral, but it was as if someone was slowly turning out the light.

About 40 minutes before totality

Then, in an instant, it went dark. The sky turned a deep inky blue, the brighter stars and planets became visible, and it looked like someone had shot a hole in the sky; a pitch-black disk (the moon) was surrounded by a brilliant white fuzzy thing (the sun’s corona). There were a couple of red solar prominences visible to the naked eye, but since my poor camera was operating at the limit of its abilities, I couldn’t successfully photograph them.

The “Diamond Ring” effect just before totality

The “sunset” during totality

The two and a half minute “moment” we’d been waiting for

The difference between a 99% eclipse and 100% totality is literally the difference between night and day. If someone shrugs and says, “oh, yeah, I’ve seen an eclipse,” then they really haven’t seen totality – it is one of the most remarkable sights most people will ever have a chance to see.

A short time lapse of the eclipse

Afterwards it was a rush to get back to Montana, turn in the RV, and fly back to DC for a quick laundry and re-pack before our flight to Paris for our 2017 canal cruise. Our next report will hopefully be on our continuing adventures (7 years and counting) on the waterways of France.

A storm over Tennessee

Weathered siding

Abandoned rail car

Waiting for totality