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Chalon sur Saone: le 14 juillet

From Cushla and John

You will have heard about the Nice tragedy - It’s so sad to see France attacked again! This is such a beautiful country and people.

We participated in the minutes silence to the victims of Nice the following Monday, only we held our silence for 6 minutes as that was what was reported on the boaties’ website. The Mathews were with us and we had just made it into a lock, therefore we observed our silence on deck with just the sound of gushing water from the lock filling.

It was quite moving.

Tim and Sally arrived on Bastille Day to celebrate the occasion with us in the city of Chalon sur Saone. John was mindful of the crowds and expressed the view that this is the type of place for another attack. Then it happened! We were just lucky it wasn’t Chalon. The Nice News spread rapidly and we are sure that is why the crowd seemed to disperse quite rapidly after a spectacular 20 minute fireworks show which we observed from a fantastic vantage point on the nearest bridge.

We travelled back through ‘our base home town - Saint Jean de Losne’ to show them our lifestyle in the shipyard repair port. In the Boulangerie next morning, Tim and John challenged a local Gendarme over his armful of croissants, when there was only one left for sale in the window! Luckily, he saw the funny side of it, but didn’t relinquish any of them - obviously for his buddies back at the station.

I wouldn’t have messed with the French Police especially in these testing times !!!

Next onto Dole. Tim and Sally handled all the Lock work and Tim was especially talented at estimating the height of our bimini allowance going under the low bridges en route. Just as we had started under one such particularly low bridge with an "All good - clear 6 inches" from Tim, we heard a loud Clack, then clack, clack, clack! behind us….!!!. Dammit! We had forgotten to lower the pink umbrella at the rear and the tip of it flipped against all the struts under the bridge. No damage, (sorry Jon, our pink umbrella is still intact!) but we all had a heart stopping moment… then lots of laughter! :-))))

That called for a glass of 'Rose’ !

Parked right along side us in Dole was a boat called “ISIS” and it’s got a for sale sign on it - Wouldn’t you think they should change the name ???

Anyway on our journey further up river, after S & T had left us, we inadvertently picked a fight with Isis. We hadn’t noticed them in the distance behind us when we entered a lock and triggered the automatic mechanism for operating it. Suddenly we heard tooting and loud shouting in German - they wanted to join us in the lock, but too late… the gates were already shutting and we could do nothing about it. The Isis captain was a very angry man!

We waited for them to catch up at the next lock and received a curt ‘merci’ in recognition of our effort to appease. We were glad he parked up and stopped following us several locks further on.

I mean really - a boat named Isis? Here’s a photo just to prove it.

And here’s a nicer one of us having a picnic on the very pleasant tree shaded area right beside our jetty at Dole.