Sedan (five years old)

First thing on Saturday I caught the train down to Montmédy to pick up the car.  I mentioned the other day that I always get nervous when fetching the car in case something has happened to it, which I know is daft but it’s the way I am.  With most rural routes having only one bus or train a day in each direction I worry about how I would get back to the boat if the car had been towed away.   

Looking down on our mooring on the way to Sedan station

This time, after carefully checking parking restrictions, I’d left it in the large square in Montmédy overlooked ny the mairie.  My worry while on the train was that I’d misread signs for which day was market day and that I’d arrive and find the car surrounded by stalls.  Needless to say, my fears were groundless and it was really good to visit the place in brilliant sunshine having been there in the pouring rain the previous week.

When I returned, our plan had been to follow one of the Sedan town trails but neither of us were particularly enamoured with the content of the leaflets we'd picked up from the tourist office the previous day.  That, coupled with a couple of disappointing trails recently, made us decide to do our own thing so headed along one of the waterfronts to find the château, the fort at the top of the hill overlooking the town.  

The Meuse splits into three as it runs through town and with a long lock cut too you are never far from water in the lower part which, like many waterway towns, has an area called Petite Venise or Little Venice. 

One of the non-navigable branches of the Meuse at Petite Venise

As we made our way along the river we noticed an abandoned pontoon.  This was the third we’d seen since being on the river Meuse and suspect they were victims of the summer floods this year and haven’t yet been rescued.

A sorry looking pontoon

Leaving the river and heading towards the hill we went through a square where the hôtel de ville stood.  By being relatively small, it went against the town hall norm of being disproportionally large for the population.

Town hall on the right

The fort was really quite amazing, and the fortified walls were among the highest we’ve seen.  It was one of those places where it wasn’t possible to get a picture that reflected the size, so I’ve cheated and included one from the town’s website:

Unfortunately, the public weren’t allowed to walk along the ramparts though I suspect parts are open if a guide was hired.   Our one and only picture is from one of the courtyards inside and shows the gate we’d come through.

As far as fortified towns go, Sedan was very disappointing because the tall trees and buildings meant it was very rare to find a spot where the château could be seen from the town below. 

When we got back down we didn’t do much more sightseeing and as there were so many squares, we couldn’t resist going to a bar for the rest of the afternoon to sample some ales from the Ardennes.

It was hardly sunup on Sunday when we noticed people out on the riverbank setting up gazebos and a RIB going down the river installing marker buoys.  They were getting ready for a day of canoe and kayak racing and not just the local club as we saw teams from places farther afield such as Mulhouse and Strasbourg.  The mist had only just cleared from the river by the time the first youngsters' race started at 10am.  

A bit fresh first thing for getting wet

We watched the racing for a while and, as we had the car, we went out to explore mooring places on the canal des Ardennes which we will be travelling on soon.  First stop was a place called Pont-à-Bar which is at the start of the canal where it leaves the Meuse.  There was a small hire boat basin and the moorings around there had to be paid for.  There was also a long line of overwintering boats a bit further away with a converted commercial at the end.  A guy was on deck playing with a child and he explained that even those moorings belonged to the boatyard.  He pointed out a short section where overnight mooring on the bollards was free but it was taken up by a commercial that had stopped for the weekend.

By the lock leading off the river were some interesting uses of aiguilles, or wooden needle dam needles arranged as easels holding boards with waterway photographs.

The racing on the river was still going on when we got back but had clearly progressed through the age groups as seniors were now competing in different events.

Monday was put aside for painting and turned out to be just the right temperature for working outside.  Vans continued to come and go all day at the campervan park next to the quay where we were moored.  The majority were Germans with Belgians, Dutch and French making up the rest in equal numbers.  Many of the campers came down for a chat when they arrived or before they left.

It was forecast to rain after lunch on Tuesday, so I played safe and gave painting a miss.  As it turned out it was a lovely sunny afternoon so I could have got on with it after all.  For our midday walk we went further down the Meuse through a place called Floing which I didn’t find easy to pronounce correctly.  Many French places have ‘gn’ in the middle rather than the more common English ‘ng’ and I have only just mastered the French pronunciation of ‘gn’ so coming across an ‘ng’ caught me unawares.

In the middle of Floing we came across a memorial to 38 French resistance fighters from Sedan who were tortured and killed just a fortnight before the town was liberated in WWII.  They had been lured to three separate fake resistance meetings or maquis and ten of them died in a cave behind the memorial.

La grotte du Gaulier

A little further along stood a memorial to the 1870 war.  It was carved from stone in the form of the trunk from an oak tree coming back to life.  It also has a woman using a sledgehammer trying to break a cannon.  An unknown number of soldiers who died in Sedan are buried at the site.

Le chêne brisé (broken oak)

Later in the afternoon there was a knocking on the boat, and I went out to chat to a Frenchman from one of the campervans.  It turned out that he and his wife had seen us last year on the Somme and he remembered our boat.  They have a boat themselves, a converted commercial moored permanently on the river Somme.  We remembered seeing it as we dropped out of the first lock on the river from the canal du Nord.  He said they saw us when we were moored at St-Valery where the river Somme enters the sea.  This guy also met friends of ours, Alistair and Sabine, near Strasbourg a short while ago.  They too have a narrowboat and he wondered if there was some sort of club we all belong to as he’s interested in buying one too.

On Wednesday it was five years ago to the day that we moved from the old Chalkhill Blue to the current one.  Back then we hadn’t even decided to definitely move to France although we were in the early stages of planning.  As we’d been living on the previous boat permanently for two years, we needed a few days to effect the move.

The old and the new

Our old boat was a 70-footer so 13 feet longer than the new one, which meant we had to be quite ruthless in deciding what we could and couldn’t keep during the move.  As we had the two boats moored together for a week, we were fortunate and could take our time completing the move.  

Buddy had lived on the boat since we’d got him from the RSPCA as a very young dog.  He found the move a bit traumatic as he would spend as much time as possible sitting on the back deck of the old one almost willing us to move back again.

Since being on Chalkhill Blue 2 the engine has run for 3,178 hours and seen us cover 3,441 miles through 2,248 locks of which 2,265 miles and 1,183 locks have ben in France.

We’re still deciding when to move on from Sedan but will probably stay a while longer and maybe have some trips out in the car to visit places further afield.