On a boat

Having my parents around for the last week of being in Tours was great. We spent time with all the teachers at a big dinner on Tuesday, having a brunch with Brigitte, Holley and my friend Claire. Saying goodbye to Sarah, another assistant at the wacky Mamie Bigoude creperie. Saying goodbye to Olivier and his family over dinner in the country.

And then we headed south.

A five hour drive, judging distance by the number of roundabouts, taking a toll road that saved us two and a half hours. We drove through a town where a flooding river had water creeping up under cars and stopped at a French truck-stop for croque-monsieurs. It was the first truly hot day I had experienced in France for months. Spent in a car. Wore a t-shirt in Toulouse. Success.

We began our boat trip at a lock station, Negra. We had expanded to be my parents and me plus two other couples. After a long hard walk with baggage in tow to the Super-U, we offloaded onto the boat and began our little journey. The locks, stations where the boat is risen up or lowered, are only open at certain times of day, meaning we only covered a small bit of ground that night and moored by the next lock. My parents and I took a walk to the closest town, a 5km round trip that was a little bit of a hike. I’ve learned that other people just don’t walk as much as the Donnellys do. We are quite unnatural in our walking stamina.

The canal is gorgeous, the villages dotted alongside are beautiful, the whole thing is very French. The kind of French that you see in magazines, displayed on travel billboards. It was surface France. Not to say that it isn’t the same kind of France that French people visit while on holiday, this is what they do. But every morning I walked or rode to the bakery and bought us bread. We ate cheese and meats and bread and drank wine and ate pastries while cruising through the tree lined canals. The days were slow, we passed through Castlenaudry with its wide basin, mooring straight into the town.

Castlenaudry

You pay for electricity and water at the moorings, boosted by low levels on the boat. Enough to charge phones but not laptops and if the boat hadn’t been running for long that day, hot water was scarce. But in all, it was luxurious. Tuesday and Wednesday were hotter days than I had seen in a while and I pulled on shorts and cycled alongside the canal. We bought icy-poles that dripped sticky juice down our arms and laughed as the men consumed more alcohol than necessary, challenging themselves to try every French beer they could lay their hands on.

Turrets at Carcassonne

Thursday saw the weather take a turn for the worse and the colder day was spent exploring the giant walled town of Carcassonne. It is a medieval fairy-tale dreamland with turrets and winding cobblestone streets- completely touristy of course- but pretty damn charming. We had picked up Patrick alongside the canal and he joined our little crew for the rest of the week. He was immediately delegated to helping with the locks as the rest of us, after doing almost 60 preceding his arrival, were rather sick of them. It was colder, but just as beautiful. We wore our puffy jackets and moored in beautiful towns, stopping for glasses of wine and to laugh at the French people with their dogs sitting pride of place on the chair next to them in tiny cafes.

It’s perfect to see people from home now. It feels like a transition period, this time. Where I have gone from doing things alone, to being a child again. To being taken care of. To eating out at restaurants again. To not worrying about money or transport of the next place or the next day of work. It will all come back soon enough though, five months after all this is looking very long. Exciting, but long. Come what may and all.