Pogny (where the bluebell woods aren't)

Moored at Pogny - the rain stopped just as we arrived

Having left Châlons-en-Champagne on Sunday and travelling the short hop to Chepy we had two nights of heavy frosts.  The forecast was for lows of -5ºC and -6ºC so we moved our freshly planed pots to safety overnight.  Some were moved into the cratch where they were completely sheltered and the others onto the back deck where we were able to cover them with a tablecloth.  The temperatures obviously did plummet as the inside of our bedroom windows were covered by jack frost both mornings.

The frosty nights have led to clear days too but not as warm as the previous couple of weeks.  This has meant butterflies have been few and far between, only seen in particularly sheltered spots with their own microclimate.  The early spring wildflowers are coming on nicely though.  There was a particularly pretty patch of cowslips right by our mooring at Chepy amid a carpet of violets:

First thing on Monday I cycled back to Châlons to pick up the car.  On the way back I popped into Pogny which is where we planned on mooring next.  Unlike when I checked last week, the quay was empty and the commercials that were moored there had moved on; we thought we'd seen all three of them come past us on Sunday having taken on grain from the silo at Pogny.

For once there’s no mishaps to report and my malfunctioning keyboard is now 100% sorted out.  After a few days drying out, all the keys were back in service other then the Enter key.  I remapped the Menu key, which I hardly ever used, to be the Enter key and my brain has already adapted to the new location of Enter.  On Tuesday evening while Karen was halfway through cooking dinner the gas ran out.  For once it wasn’t raining, snowing, icy or windy but it was dark when venturing onto the front deck to switch the supply to a new bottle.  I did have a small mishap stepping onto the front as I slipped and nearly fell in.  I barked my left shin badly as I leapt over the gap to avoid falling in the water.  My painful shin has since got me wondering if it would have been better to have just gone in!

We were rather spoilt in Châlons as we had permanent connection to power and water, but it hasn’t taken long to get used to running the engine when we need hot water or all those other things we have to do when living off grid.  Most of them are common sense and those who are environmentally minded would do naturally like catching water in a saucepan whilst waiting for the hot water to come through a tap.  Before anyone shouts, we are only keeping the car with us a few weeks until the Covid situation becomes clearer and we can find somewhere to leave it until the end of the year.

Our mooring at Chepy is 2½ kilometres below the next lock and even at that distance we can tell if a boat is coming down.  It always surprises us how, from that far away, the effect of a lockful of water emptying can be felt in the boat.  Of course, it takes about 30 minutes before the boat coming down the lock reaches us especially if they are fully laden.  An average of four commercials have come past each day, empty ones heading our way and laden ones in the opposite direction.  We have also seen two large private Dutch barges come past. We’ve often seen Melinda on this canal and here she is fully laden but not as low in the water as she could be:

Another old favourite is El Paso who was also fairly low in the water when she came past:

So, what have we been doing this week?  Karen has continued enjoying her short break back at work and her ‘office’ set up in the dinette works really well.  If she is running a meeting, then we do make sure that hers is the only device connected to the internet just to be on the safe side as it would be embarrassing if she ran out of bandwidth and dropped out. On most days she has been able to take a long enough break at lunchtime so we can go for a walk and we have also managed to get a walk together in the evenings.  We’ve found some lovely quiet walks, none of which have taken us through any human habitation.  Strange when I look back as one of the reasons for staying in one place for a week or so was so we could investigate local villages.  One of our walks brings us out on the river Marne which we can then follow either upstream or downstream.

Mistletoe crop near the Marne

Another walk runs through woods alongside the canal.  The woods feel like they should be bluebell woods, but the woodland floor is covered in the sprouting leaves of a flower unknown to us. One day we came across a stone with 24,6 on it.  We knew we were between pk24 and pk25 on the canal, but we were in the woods on the opposite side to the towpath where the kilometre stones are normally sited.  This 24,6 was about halfway between pk24 and pk25 but we have found no others on that side of the canal let alone a reason for it being there or why it was necessary to have that precision.

Can’t find out anything about this stone

I’ve been busy cutting up the branches on the roof and finding somewhere to store the logs.  Alongside our mooring are several large blocks of limestone or similar that have been ideal for using as saw benches.

One of my saw benches

We’ve been expecting the strong winds and rain that hit many parts of the UK this week to come our way but managed to avoid the bad weather until Saturday when it started in the early hours and was still going when we got up.  We had planned to move to Pogny over the weekend so it looked like Sunday would be the better day.  As it turned out Saturday wasn’t a bad day in the end with just a few spring-like showers, the sort that start suddenly and then disappear after a few minutes followed by bright sunshine.

Spring shower approaching

On one of our walks we solved the secret of the mystery plants in the woods around Chepy.  In several areas the first blooms had started appearing and we realised that the woodland floor was soon going to be a carpet of grape hyancinths, a similar colour to but not as tall as bluebells.

Grape hyancinths

With an afternoon of sport that we wanted to watch on Sunday including cricket and the final six nations match of the weekend, we set off early so we could be tied up at Pogny before the main event as far as our family was concerned: we have both Southampton and Brighton supporters so it was a family derby as well as a south coast one.

Leaving Chepy – our home for the last week

Dark clouds started gathering soon after we set off and it was still raining an hour or so later when we were approaching our destination of the village of Pogny. 

Ominous looking clouds

Karen and Buddy walked the whole way other than jumping on board when we went up the one and only lock.  We passed two grain silos on the journey but the quays at each didn’t have any boats waiting to load up.

The silos at Pogny

We moored up by 10.30 just as the sun started coming out, took on water and soon settled in.  Other than a couple of short walks during breaks between matches we stayed in for the rest of the day.

Moored at Pogny

Pogny is a small but expanding village with a population of just over 900 which is double that recorded 20 years ago.  As expected, the old part of the village is centred around the church and mairie with all the modern housing stretching out along the canal.  Many of the new houses are large by French village standards so maybe it’s one of those desirable places to live for people who commute to (or used to before last year) Châlons-en-Champagne.

The old part of the village still looks like this but with no people

To put Pogny in geographical context it is in the Marne département which is one of the ten départements in the Grand-Est région which, during administrative restructuring in 2016, was formed by the merger of Alsace, Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine.  Our current cruising plan is to travel west to east across the entire region ending up in its administrative capital of Strasbourg.

French Mothering Sunday is at the end of May which is the traditional month for that day across the majority of countries.  For some reason, along with a couple of other countries it is celebrated in March in the UK.  The UK, for better or worse, has also adopted the Americanism Mothers' Day.  Like many Brits, Karen had an online session with her children made extra special by all of them, including Karen, cooking scones so we could all have cream teas together.

On Sunday morning we cruised three miles up one lock in the rain.