Another Town, Another Citadel

We're not purposely seeking out citadels in the towns we're visiting, it's just that they seem to be rather difficult to avoid. Politics, geography, topography, and the technology of war in the Middle Ages all combined to promote the building of fortifications in strategic locations along the Meuse River. Givet and Dinant were already mentioned as sites for hilltop forts. Now we can include Namur and Huy as towns boasting citadels of their own.

Commercial boats moored on the Meuse, the Citadel of
Namur on the hill in the background.

The citadel overlooking the town of Huy.

The weather was rather dreary when we left Dinant on Monday, August 23. It's been an unfortunate truth that getting a maximum of two days in a row of good weather seems to be the norm this July and August.

Gray and wet weather notwithstanding, the smiles of Ebe and Lon
show that a less-than-perfect weather day on the water can still be more
enjoyable than a day spent elsewhere.

The landscape between Dinant and Namur remained hilly, beautiful, and full of surprises.

Most building is still done "between rock and water"--unless, of
course, someone manages to get something built on the top of the hill.

A clever concrete replica of a river barge.
We think it's a residence, but as we could only see it in passing,
we're not completely certain.

And the chateaux just keep a'comin' . . .

We moored in Namur at the city marina, under the watchful eye of the citadel. Namur is a government town, the capitol of the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia. It sits at the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse rivers, which helps to account for its strategic importance throughout its history. Of course, being of "strategic importance" means that you're fought over, change hands multiple times, and usually suffer great damage as a result. For Namur that was true in the Middle Ages and it was true in the two World Wars of the last century.

Current-day Namur has an old town that allows for pleasant strolling and shopping, but its biggest tourist attraction is its citadel. Like most forts of this type, it has been rebuilt and remodeled several times since it was first established. Most of the existing citadel can be credited to the Dutch, who had control of Namur at various times before Belgian independence in the 1800's. The late 1600's saw some contributions from French military expert Vauban.

The citadel can be accessed via a strenuous climb, or via
cable cars. We opted for cable cars up, walking down.

There were great views of the town from the cable car . . .

. . . and from various points on the citadel grounds. The boats
seen to the left in the photo are in the small boat section of
the city port. CARIB III was moored on the opposite bank of
the river, and not visible from this vantage point.

One small part of the citadel interior.

We got one of "two good weather days" on August 24 for our sightseeing in Namur, and that turned into a lovely evening when we had a farewell dinner with Ebe and Carla at a restaurant overlooking the Sambre River.

The great weather stretched into the next day as well, as we made our way to Huy. Commercial barges are definitely more numerous now, and we went through our first 200-meter-long lock.

We are about 2/3 of the way into the lock. Depending on the sizes
of boats using the lock in any given empty/fill cycle, it is possible
for a gate to be deployed across the midpoint of the lock so as to
decrease the amount of water needing to be emptied (and filled).

There are more commercial boats to be seen downstream of Namur,
both parked and moving. There is also more industry visible
along the shore.

Carla and Ebe cruised with us until we moored at the Royal Yacht Club de Huy, and then left after lunch to catch the first of the trains that would take them home to the Netherlands. We had originally planned to stay only one night, but decided it might be nice to spend a day in Huy to do some minor chores and have a little R&R.

The RYCH is a nice facility, but it is probably a bit on the small side for us. A working bow thruster would have made the docking easier. It is not an easy entrance/exit between marina and river, so we may have to do some "magic" with our lines to smooth our passage when we leave tomorrow morning.

CARIB III moored at the RYCH. We took the boat into the basin
at the foreground of the photo earlier today and got the boat turned
so that we don't have to back out on our exit. It may look like plenty
of space for us to maneuver, but that is the deception of a wide-angle lens.

We spent a few hours today walking through the older part of Huy. Though nothing visible remains of its origins during the Roman era, it has a large church that was built in several phases from the 12th to the 14th centuries (and subsequently repaired a number of times after sieges and other attacks on the city), and has managed to retain some of its Gothic and Renaissance buildings. The current Huy citadel was constructed in the early 1800's by the Dutch over the ruins of previous versions of the fort, and was used as a detention center by the Germans in WWII. Huy's cable car to its citadel is not functioning, so we decided that our visits to the citadels in Dinant and Namur had been a sufficient number of citadels for one week.