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July 17, 2008

Up early, we said our goodbyes and Zak and I hit the bus back to CDG. The line-ups at the airport were a bit different than anything I had ever experienced at the Edmonton International, but eventually we figured it out and even managed to use the unfamiliar (at the time) passport-scannie-thing. Zak and I snacked in the boarding lounge and eventually boarded our plane home.

July 18, 2008

Back at home Zak and I did laundry and started packing again as we were off right away for another week camping our way across southern BC with my brother. Then Leslie was supposed to meet us in Vancouver and we were going to do some climbing in Squamish.

The Girls in Paris

L & C took a couple of days to see more of Paris. I am not sure what all they got up to, but I do know they took in Notre Dame, Musée d’Orsay, the Père Lachaise Cemetery — where all the best people are buried, and The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, another famous English language bookstore.

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Thus ends the account of our 2008 trip to France. Most of my pictures of the camping trip with Doug were lost in a crash. The three of us hit Jasper and Wells Grey and did some canoeing before splitting up. Then Doug took his truck home and we headed for Squamish. Later we picked Leslie up at Horseshoe Bay.

We climbed Squamish for a few days, did a tour of Howe Sound by jetski and then drove back across BC on our way home.

 

July 16, 2008

The leisurely holidays were over and it was back to schedules, big cites and tourist traps for us. We packed up the rest of our belongings and precious booze cargo and disembarked with one last picture of us and our boat. Then we headed along the canal bank to the foot bridge so we could cross to the train station we had been at a scant 11 days earlier. Along the way we stopped and had a little picnic, checked out the cool topiaries and visited an old wash house. These wash houses were where traditionally the village people would bring their clothes and wash them. Most of them have been converted to pretty ponds and we would see many more of them on subsequent trips.

 

At the station we boarded our train, a double decker commuter, quite unlike our previous train. After a short wait in the mostly empty car,  it started to move and we waved goodbye to our boat, looking sad and forlorn across the basin. Then L settled in to read Madame Bovary and the rest of us sat back and watched the countryside roll by.

Paris. We disembarked and crossed the street to our hotel; it was much easier to find this time. This was our (Zak and I’s ) last day in France and we had some major sight seeing to do, so we dumped our bags and crossed the Seine to start getting to it.

We wandered by the Museum of Natural Heritage but then ducked down into the Metro. One of my first experiences with big city transit, I was was suitably impressed with how easy it was to navigate (once we figured out the ticket machines) and soon we were off scurrying across underground Paris. We popped up somewhere near the Eiffel Tower, although we couldn’t actually see it, and eventually came across the long grassed green (Champs de Mars) that leads to the base of the tower. We took our time and meandered along and soon were directly under Mr. Eiffel’s amazing edifice. No one particularly wanted to wait in the long lines to ascend so we read the signs, admired the legs and ate a couple of baguette dogs.

Then we crossed the Seine again, stopping along the way to watch the illegal street vendors and tourists interact and of course the Sûreté who would eventually arrive to chase them off. The river itself was full of tour boats and industrial barges, with seemingly as much traffic as the roads had. Across the river we looked back to admire the Tower once more before we then struck off to the Arc de Triumph. Some of the building architecture along the route was breathtaking and a real insight into the cultural history of the city and its inhabitants. I love old cities.

We toured the Arc, read the signs and admired the construction and sculpture, taking a moment to appreciate its dedications to soldiers past. But once again we  decided against the lines and did not pay to climb to the top.

Then we were off again on our whirlwind tour of Paris’ must-see sights. We hit the Metro again and travelled under the Champs de L’Elysée: shopping was just not our thing. We popped up again (with a few mishaps involving wrong stops and missing tickets) at Les Invalides, home of a war museum and Napoleon’s tomb. We were still on a time budget so we decided not to visit this trip. After sitting and admiring  for a while we walked down embassy row and checked out the Canadian embassy. The we turned and followed the river walking by all the best buildings like the Musée d’Orsay and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères.

Then we crossed the Pont Royal and came out near the Jardin des Tuileries right across from the smaller Arc de triumphe du Carrousel and of course, the Palace des Tuileries, home of the Louvre.

We wandered the Gardens for a bit and a seemingly delightful man offered to draw a picture of Zak. We didn’t realize at the time this was the beginning of his tiny scam to separate us from our money, but figured it out when he then tried to insist that we owed him for the drawing we hadn’t asked for. Picking the kid was his ploy to make us “want” to have it despite the cost. In the end we paid him something to avoid the scene and thus justified his little game. Sigh. Tourists. We are all the same…

Wednesday evening is cheap night at the Louvre. All right, I don’t think it was actually cheaper, but it is open late on Wednesdays and the crowds were smaller So we headed in to see what we could see. Outside the little glass cleaning robot was clinging to the sides of the glass pyramids so I snapped a few pictures of that. Most famous art museum in the world and I am taking pictures of a robot. Huh.

We bought our tickets and decided it was every humanoid for him/herself. So we split up and went. I decided bulk was more important than individual appreciation, so I managed to cover pretty much the whole museum in the few hours we had. I think everyone else tried to concentrate a bit more on the experience. Still I saw what I wanted and discovered a few things that still amaze me.

We met back up at the end of the traditional closing-time-visitor-herding-manoeuvre and posed for a picture by the inverted glass pyramid. Then we took the Metro back to the hotel and sat on the street eating and sharing one last glass of French wine. Bonne nuit Paris; it had been a hell of an introduction to travelling abroad.

 

July 15, 2008

And so we say goodbye to Auxerre and head along the River Yonne for Migennes. It’s an early start. Last day travelling on the boat and first day of the long journey home; at least for Zak and I. L and C are staying over a few more days in Paris by themselves to see what kind of trouble they can get into.

We are on the river for the rest of the trip except for about a hundred yards at the end when we turn into the basin at the head of the Canal de Bourgogne. River travel is subtly different. Of course it’s a wider body of water and the banks are wilder and less manicured, but much later I realized that life tends to cluster around the banks of rivers and so a feeling of civilization and development underlies the scenery. The canals were much more like tree-lined farmers’ fields — mostly because that’s what they were.

We cast off our neighbours fairly early in the morning. It was one of the longer days ahead for us, and as well I didn’t want to inconvenience any fellow travellers inboard of us. And predictably after the holiday, it was busy on the river. Most of the day we travelled along in a convoy of 4 boats with us in the lead; the locks and speed limits tend to make groups like that. Most of the river locks were huge with enough room for boats on either side of the locks and three or four boats long. I guess that would be for the big river barges coming from (or going to) Paris etc. As well at every lock there would be a weir to help keep the river under control. The rivers of France, and indeed most of Europe, have long been tamed and bare little resemblance to our North American (or at least Western Canadian) idea of what a river is.

One type of weir was made of vertical boards, like 2 x 12s, laid along a rail. when they used to move logs by the river they would pull the boards out and allow the logs to float over the weir then replace the boards to reestablish the weir. An old technology but still in use today.

Gradually we began to hit more and more industrial territory and even passed through a small shipyard with all sorts of boats docked to piers or up on the hard. Eventually we arrived at the last lock to turn onto the the Canal de Bourgogne and waited for it to open. There were a few boats already waiting and it looked to be the biggest (and by that I mean deepest) lock yet. Eventually the huge sluice gates opened and we followed two other boats slowly into the lock. The lock keeper lowered a hook for us to attach out dock line to as the climb would have been impossible.

And then we waited as the lock slowly filled.

Just outside the lock was our ultimate destination and a few minutes later I slowly backed the boat into the pier for the last time. It had been a fabulous trip and I knew then were were definitely going to do it again.

So all that was left was cleaning and packing. We all cleaned up a bit and then Zak and I kicked the girls off the boat and started in on giving it a good scrub down. They headed into Migennes to explore. Later when they returned they were full of tales of double J cups and French lingerie saleswomen so I have some idea of what they were doing. Before we recycled our bottles we lined up the whole trips worth and snapped a few pictures. It was actually hard to let some of them go as we knew we would never see their like again.

That night we ate dinner aboard to use up the last of our supplies and drank the wine we didn’t plan on bringing back to Canada. It was a lovely night with a full moon and a melancholy air.

July 14, 2008

WooHoo! It was Bastille Day!

We roused ourselves and clambered over our neighbours’ boats to shore, then headed into town for the parade. Yup, there was a parade. It ran along the river road, complete with Foreign Legion-like soldiers and really cool fire trucks. Oh, and free wine and pastry. Yup, you heard me. Free wine for breakfast. Ain’t France grand. All in all, a cool way to start the morning.

Auxerre is an old city, dating back to Roman times and stuffed full of history. Today was church-a-polooza. Auxerre has three major churches and a number of small — but still pretty damn big — ones to fill our (my) ecclesiastically voracious architecture brains. I can’t really describe them so I will let my pictures do most of the talking.

Cathedral of St. Étienne (11th–16th centuries).  Gothic style, with 11th century crypt houses the remains of the former Romanesque cathedral.

After we left St. Stevens, we wandered up through town (chock full of medieval buildings), saw a medieval clock tower and checked out the exterior of the Church of St Eusèbe which dated back as far as the 7th century with a Romanesque tower and a Gothic nave.

See the round Romanesque arches in the tower?

More wandering ensued. We spied a printer with modernist typefaces, some cool topiaries and a Louis XIII style mansion on Rue Soufflot that had a passage knocked through it in 1907 to make way for a road. Then we headed for the town square for a much needed beer in an outdoor café. At some point Zak had declared enough is enough and wandered off to do his version of tourism: the hunt for fireworks. We wished him well and headed for the next church.

This was also the point where we learned a key difference between  Canadian french and France french. Because Quebecers are (overly?) consumed with preserving the language, they insist on translating everything into french. Thus iced tea is translated into tea glacé; makes sense right? We’ve read it on the side of a can millions of times. Well it turns out that since iced tea is not a culturally French drink, the French in France are not all that concerned about it and have never bothered to translate it. So when Leslie ordered a tea glacé at the cafe, she was met with blank stares. Turns out the natives pronounce it iced tea (with a French accent). Huh.

Then it was on to Abbey of Saint-Germain (dating from 9th century). The website has some great info. The crypt has some of the most ancient mural paintings in France, and houses the tomb of the bishops of Auxerre. The site includes the chapter room (12th century), the cellar (14th century) and the cloister (17th century). This was an abbey (where monks hang out), so it had our first real example of cloisters. One of the more interesting (to me) thing about this edifice is the approach to it is very unassuming. I suppose since it wasn’t meant for public-facing worship the facade was not as important as it would be on a similarly sized cathedral. It was pretty damn fancy from other angles though.

The excavations of the crypts dating from the Carolingian era under the foundations were absolutely fascinating.

Afterwards we we met up with one of the local French greeter cats and C & L got their fill of cat snuggles. Oh and Leslie found her fellow socialists’ association. Then it was on to St. Pierre en Vallée (17th–18th centuries), established over a 6th-century abbey. A neo-Gothic church, it has a tower similar to that of the cathedral. We didn’t stay long.

Then we met back up with the boy and wandered back to the “fireworks” area so he could let loose his pyro.

Afterwards it was dinner, where Leslie confirmed her love for the anchovy pizza (Actually a Neapolitano with anchovies and capers. Can you say salty?). Whole anchovies. Stinky anchovies. I still suspect every time she mentions she wants to go back to France, it’s really for the anchovy pizza. Then it was back to the boat and more wine and crib by candlelight on deck. We were treated to live music from a club across the river, the most memorable of which was a very Vegas-like rendition of Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing. Another make-me-smile memory.

C’s frozen sock art.