Dormans (lows and highs)

Wednesday marked six months since we started continuously cruising in France and the highlights have included:

• Being welcomed by the French everywhere we went
• Travelling the length and breadth of Champagne & Burgundy
• Cruising through the centre of Paris on the River Seine
• Swimming in the River Marne
• Being rescued by frogmen on the Canal de l’Ourcq
• Meeting fantastic people including éclusiers & other boaters
• Enjoying the peace and quiet of beautiful and litter-free countryside & villages
• Going days without seeing any other boats
• Mooring in beautiful cities and towns like Paris, Reims, Dijon, Auxerre & Châlons-en-Champagne
• Marvelling at the size of mairies, especially when compared to the local population
• Only buying wine produced in the areas we travelled, likewise with cheese
• Eating pain au chocolate every day

The low lights have been: 

• Having two plant pots stolen in a Paris suburb
• Losing power in a staircase lock when a throttle cable broke
• Scaring ourselves on the River Saône
• Me fainting three times in one of the canicules (heatwaves)

The six months in numbers:

• Travelling on 11 different canals and five rivers
• Covering 1,493 kilometres (933 miles)
• Going through 553 locks
• Consuming 664 litres of fuel
• Trolleying 35 jerry cans to and from petrol stations
• Using up two 13kg propane gas bottles
• Seeing 36 species of butterfly
• Having two holidays
• Finding 36 lavoirs
• Largest locks 180 x 11.4 metres
• Deepest lock 11 metres
• Longest boat to pass us 170 metres
• Visiting five of the 12 French mainland regions

Where it all started: being craned in at Migennes on 26^th March 2019

For those of you with a like mind to mine, you may find this interesting: Each of the five rivers we have been on in France consist of five letters only and they also all end in the letter e.  [Loire, Marne, Saône, Seine & Yonne]

Before I get onto Wednesday here is a picture of the French WWI cemetery at Port-à-Binson.  I have included this because on the previous blog entry I had mentioned that the different religions or non-religions of the soldiers are shown by the headstone.  Here you can clearly see that some graves are marked with a headstone rather than a cross.  We wish we had looked more closely at the headstones so we could see the differences between the three types: Muslim, Jew and free thinkers.

Some of the graves at Port-à-Binson

Contrary to our expectation, Wednesday wasn’t our first jeans day since April as we were still in shorts & tee-shirts for cruising, but we did have rain off and on as we cruised down to Dormans.  To be honest though, we did change out of our shorts when we went for a walk later in the afternoon before the sun came out.

Miserable looking day for a change

We arrived in Dormans before lunch and found the pontoon by the campsite was empty, so we moored up for the day.  Dormans was another town that we hadn’t stopped at on our way up, so we had lunch before exploring the town.  As is our wont we made for the tourist information office to see if they had any heritage trails we could follow. 

Us on the left (right bank), grain silos in the distance and Dormans to the right (left bank)

We had to get to the other side of town to reach the tourist office.  As we crossed the main street, we were surprised to see one busy with people for once.  The tourist office was based in a château dating from the 13^th century and two lovely ladies were in attendance.  There was no sign of the château being used for anything else, but the ladies explained we could rent if we wanted to!  They also said my French was good but that was probably because I kept making them laugh.  

The tourist information office 😉

We do find the information in the tourist offices varies.  This one was fine for people wanting to visit Champagne but not the town itself.  The ladies said it wasn’t worth producing a heritage trail as the only places of interest were the gardens of the château and the WWI war memorial on the hill behind it!

The grounds were impressive, and we had a good walk around them.  There was a marquée in the back garden of the château so we assumed the place could be hired for weddings and other events.  We came across an old watermill that now houses a ‘rural’ museum but was closed on Wednesdays.  We continued out the back of the grounds up the hill and suddenly came across the war memorial.  This was a large structure like the American memorial at Château-Thierry that we visited a while ago.  Unlike the American one, which was 'in your face' and could be seen for miles around, this was discretely hidden in a clearing in the woods on the side of the hill.

The WWI memorial of the battles of the Marne at Dormans

I know it seems we are seeing a lot of these memorials, but we have been in the area of some horrific WWI battles over the last few months.  It’s not that we support wars either, but these memorials do bring home the enormous sacrifices people made in those days.  We see them, not as places celebrating victory, but as a reminder that we should live in peace. 

The cloisters to the side of the building are inscribed inside with the names of the battles along the Marne and associated losses:

 

This memorial was built with a large chapel which I find incongruous but in those days more people were religious and thanked their God for victories.  When we finished in the memorial and the château grounds we headed back down to the boat, leaving exploring the rest of the town for another time.

Another view of the château

We were moored opposite the church at Dormans which had a clock with rather loud chimes.  Not only were they loud but the chimes rang every quarter of an hour.  As nice as it is hearing the chimes, especially when they are at the correct time, which seems to be rare, we rather hoped they didn’t start too early in the morning 😉

Our mooring opposite the church at Dormans

On Wednesday we cruised 11 kilometres down one lock.

We were saved by the bells as they say, and the first chimes didn’t ring out until a quarter past seven on Thursday morning.  It was drizzling when we awoke and, although it soon stopped for the day, it remained grey with only the odd glimpse of sunshine.  There was a good bricolage just out of town, so we walked down there in the morning as we needed to get some hooks and a new paint roller and a few other items. We passed a well-stocked greengrocer on our way back, so we took advantage to top up our supplies.

As with yesterday, the town was quite busy, and we also noticed there were very few premises closed down.  Remembering that we are in Champagne then I suppose it’s probably a relatively prosperous area for a rural town so maybe that’s one of the reasons we found it like this.

We have been using the internet to watch the rugby and just managed to see the England game before our 100gig/month allowance ran out.  We have never gone over the 100gig before but watching the rugby doesn’t help as it is on ITV which, unlike BBC, doesn’t have the option of different quality streaming.  This means all ITV streaming is high quality and therefore uses a lot more data than watching the equivalent on a BBC channel.  

It was quite windy in the afternoon, so we decided not to move and got on with a lot of those jobs that we put off for days like these.  We plan on getting to Château Thierry for the weekend and will probably have a small cruise tomorrow to get part way there.