La Chaussée-sur-Marne (all change here)

We changed our cruising route yet again last Wednesday.  We’ve been concerned about going into départements that are likely to become Covid hotspots so have been studying the maps of France depicting the indicative measures in each département.  As it looks like the three départements in the east that we were planning on going through, Bas-Rhin, Moselle and Meurthe-et-Moselle, are on the increase we decided it would be prudent to avoid them.  This means we won’t be heading for Strasbourg after all but will revert to the original plan for this year and head south down the canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne to the river Saône before we decide what to do next.

The only drawback in taking that route (that we can think of at the moment!) is that the canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne doesn’t open until the end of March after four weeks closure for maintenance.  As we’re only 15kms from the junction where we join the start of the canal it means hanging around in this area until then.  Weighing it up it seemed quite sensible especially considering how sparsely populated the départements we’ll be travelling through are, such as Côte-d’Or and Haute Marne.  The spot we’ve been staying in this week is ideal to stay at for a while as no one comes along because it’s at a dead end on this side of the cut and Buddy can be off the lead when he’s outside.

Our field

The much-awaited news conference by the French PM, Jean Castex, finally happened last Thursday night after being delayed yet another hour at the last minute.  Unlike the UK where nearly everything is leaked in advance, it seems the opposite is done here which of course leads to much speculation in the press.  As from last Friday night, north eastern France and the Alpes-Maritime went go back into 24/7 lockdown rather than just at weekends.  This will be reviewed in four weeks, but weekly monitoring will still take place in all the other areas where, with next weeks’ Western European Summertime clock change, the daily curfew has been decreased by one hour and will start at 7pm rather than 6pm.  The locks on most of the smaller, Freycinet gauge, canals that we travel on tend to close at 6pm for non-commercial traffic, so starting the curfew an hour later at 7pm won't really impact us.

A few people we know were planning on cruising in the north east so will have to change their plans.  Similarly, those who are already there will have to stay put for at least four weeks.  The départements impacted by the new lockdown are in red, the pink star is us now and the blue star is where we’re now heading over the next couple of months.

On Thursday we heard a small engine approaching; this was the first boat for over a week and we soon realised it was Zoe & Sebastian on their small motor yacht.  Like us, they are waiting for the canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne to open but had found a place to WWOOF for a few days not far from here.  For those of you who don’t know the expression or want to read about it, click here for more information. 

We keep in touch with our children in various ways and frequencies from texting through to video calls, and also have video calls with the grandchildren almost daily.  We’ve never got into regular video calls with friends but there are a few boater friends that we catch up with every couple of months or so.  One such group includes Mike & Lesley and Chris & Sue.  I used to work with Lesley and Chris and coincidentally all of us have ended up with narrowboats.  Mike is the great organiser and not just because he is the technical one.  We were due to have an afternoon drinks catch up on Friday at 4.30 UK time and Mike had sent Zoom invitations days in advance; in any other group the details are sent a few minutes before the get together.  I mentioned Mike as being technical and he probably uses an advanced form of Zoom/Google because our invitation, unbeknownst to us, had automatically adjusted the meeting time to French time and we’d assumed it was UK time.  We’d got back from a walk and were just sitting down with drinks when we saw we’d missed a message from Mike about 45 minutes previously asking if we were joining.  We thought he was eager and said yes we've got three minutes and he immediately messaged back saying they were just finishing up.  Anyway, we made amends for being an hour late and had some good laughs and a catch up on Sunday instead.   

I can’t resist telling you about a kilometre stone we came across on one of our walks.  We have found all bar a handful along the 67km length of this canal.  Only one of the stones has been original and the rest have been either from the early 1900s or modern ones from early this century.  The one we came across on Friday was one of the ones we were missing and is also one of the originals:

Pk 14

We will probably stay at La Chaussée-sur-Marne while we’re waiting for the works on the canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne to finish.  We'll need a quick trip back to Pogny to fill up with water, but this spot is ideal not just for Buddy as I mentioned earlier but because picnic tables and benches have been provided for boaters, they make excellent saw benches for log cutting.  We’ve lost the fine warm weather of the last few weeks and are finding we need the stove on; not that we’re complaining as it’s still March.

Our field from the other side

It’s unusual to find a lock without a lock cottage over here.  Many of the cottages are in private hands but many are still lived in by lock keepers (éclusiers) or used as local canal offices. It is also unusual to find a lock cottage that is uninhabited but the one just down from where we are currently moored is in quite a sorry state:

Dilapidated lock cottage at écluse de Chaussée

On Sunday morning we walked to a small village called Ablancourt.  It didn’t take long to walk around it and we neither saw nor heard anyone or anything other than a couple of typically noisy dogs left out in gardens as seems to be the French way. 

Approaching Ablancourt on a grey Sunday morning

The sign on the mairie saying it was only open on Mondays and then just for two hours in the morning seemed to confirm the fact that there were little more than 150 inhabitants. 

We’re now quite used to walking around villages and seeing few if any people, but we still remark that if we were back in the UK there would be activity in even the sleepiest of villages: people washing cars or working in their gardens. 

A nice touch on the village war memorial was the tricolor spray painted on the gravel:

Saint Martin’s church is typical of the area; squat and built of limestone

While we were in the village, we had a look at the next lock along and found there were a couple of mooring bollards above the lock suitable for a boat our size.  As it was outside the village it was nice and secluded and one of those spots where Buddy would be safe off the lead.  On this coming Wednesday we were going to go back to Pogny to get water and then return to La Chaussée-sur-Marne.  Having seen the mooring at Ablancourt we think we’ll probably moor there instead.

Regular readers will have probably noticed that we haven’t seen any lavoirs yet this year but I’m sure that will change as we head down to Burgundy.  Similarly, we saw no Victorian post boxes (another of our passions) when we were back in the UK over the winter.  Mind you that wasn’t surprising as we were in lock down for the whole time we were back.  Our son, Steve, was on a work visit in Wimbledon on Monday and sent this rather nice VR box he managed to see on his way.  This in an early box from the 1870s designed by a Mr Penfold, whose name is used for these hexagonal boxes.

A Penfold in Wimbledon dating from 1873-78

We’ve been so used to not seeing any boats coming past while we’ve been here that it took us a while to recognise the sound of one coming on Monday morning.  The guy and his wife came out on deck to take pictures while I did the same (of course):

An empty Sueña (Spanish for dream although Catherine says it should really be Sueño)

While on commercials I’ll show you the mooring hooks we’re attached to at the moment.  These hooks are usually placed around 50m apart along straight stretches of the canal and are used by commercials mooring overnight.  Unusually there are five in this field that are only 20m apart so we can easily moor between two of them:

Handy mooring hook

Having not moved for a week we are still only 11kms and three locks from Chálons-en-Champagne where we set out from over two weeks ago.