Does Time Fly?

While the aerial capabilities of time are a matter of opinion, it seems to me that, like the water we've been on this summer, the perception of the passage of time is "fluid." When we were in Maasbracht in the spring waiting for work on the boat to be completed, it sometimes felt as though time was advancing only slowly. Once we started cruising in mid-June, our sense was that the passage of time speeded up and has continued to accelerate throughout the summer--because, unbelievably--here we are in Cergy, already at the end of our cruising for the year, and with only 5 weeks remaining until we return to Florida.

We passed through our last lock of the year yesterday at Pontoise

It's also already been a full week since I published the last blog posting. It seems like the "Publish" button was just pushed a couple of days ago, but we have been a little busy and without the kind of "down time" that I usually require for writing.

The furthest we traveled on any day since we left Compiegne on August 24 was 24 km (about 14 miles). We did that twice. On each of the other 3 cruising days we only traveled 13 km (about 8 miles). There aren't a lot of locks on the Oise, so the most locks we did in any one day was 2. It still continues to amaze us how many interesting things we can find by moving just a little bit. Another day, another town, another abbey, another castle, another museum all vying for attention. It becomes a matter of picking one or two things to do and ignoring the rest--as with everything else in life, it's not possible to do it all.

Wednesday, August 24: Our pick of the day was the Royal Abbey of Moncel, in the town of Pont-Sainte-Maxence. In 1306, King Philip the Fair (no narcissism there) transformed an old hunting lodge into a castle, and a few years later, founded l'Abbaye Royale du Moncel for the Clarisse order of nuns. Already in decline by the late 16th century, the abbey church was pulled down and destroyed during the French Revolution, its stones sold as building materials. The main abbey building survived to be variously occupied by a wine merchant, a seminary and boarding school, and, in World War II, by the Germans. 

The ruins of the castle (adjacent to the abbey). Only the towers
of the 13th/14th centuries remain intact

One exterior aspect of the refectory. Several rooms are open to explain the realities of monastic life "back in the day", some rooms are available for meetings and events, and other parts of the 
building are still undergoing restoration

Thursday, August 25: Our stop for the day was Creil, a relatively large town, with the remnants of a 13th century chateau (of course--in the Middle Ages chateaux seemed to be as thick on the ground as monasteries and abbeys.) The traffic was horrendous, so biking very far within the town was out of the question. What we did instead on this day was to cycle a few kilometers to the neighboring village of Verneuil-en-Halatte to visit the Serge Ramond Museum, previously known as the "Memoire des Murs et des Hommes" (memory of walls and men.) The museum is the only one in Europe dedicated to the testimony that graffiti has left through the centuries on the walls of churches, prisons, quarries, castles, and the like. For more than 40 years, Mr. Serge Ramond made moldings of graffiti--more than 3,500 in total. These records provide a fascinating historical perspective.

From the belfry in Amiens, graffiti of Australian
prisoners of war in WWI

A war scene from the 12th century, on a portion of the wall engravings
inside the church in Moings. The dress of the soldiers is like that found in the Bayeux
tapestries, thereby dating the drawings to the end of the 11th or beginning
of the 12th centuries. Historians think that the author of the drawings was
working when the church was built, perhaps as a young apprentice
stonemason in the 1120-1150 time period

That same day, a lovely couple from Germany, Helmut and Barbara, pulled their cruiser next to our boat and rafted up because they couldn't find a good mooring spot on the quay. They had quite a collection of Bavarian wines aboard--60 bottles!--and were anxious to have us taste a couple of them. We had a pleasant visit aboard their boat after dinner, and they were right, the wines were very good.

Friday, August 26: We decided to stay moored for one more day in Creil and visit the Domaine de Chantilly, about 12 kilometers away. The Domaine was built up from the Middle Ages by various owners. It is called the Castle of Princes, having housed the Conde dynasty. In the 16th century the first castle was transformed into a Renaissance-style chateau; The Great Stables--a veritable palace for horses--was added in the 1700's; and gardens of various styles were developed at different times. The current chateau is a re-construction of the Great Chateau, which had been destroyed during the Revolution. The rebuild was commissioned by the Duke of Aumale in the 19th century, the last of the Condes, to house his collections of paintings, manuscripts and furniture. He had no surviving heirs, so he bequeathed the Domaine to the Institut de France for the public good.

The Chateau of Chantilly: a confection in stone

The horse-racing track

The interior of the stables

The Great Stables, and a horse coming out for exercise

The library. The Duke had almost 19,000 works, including
 1500 manuscripts. The display cases contained many
original Bibles from the 1500's and 1600's

The castle entryway

A slightly different route returned us to Creil via the village of St-Leu-d'Esserent. We had originally planned to stop there with the boat, but weren't sure that the mooring would be adequate, so we opted for a "by land" visit instead.

The Saint-Leu claim to fame was its Benedictine Abbey. The abbey church was huge, on a
scale with some cathedrals. It miraculously escaped intense bombings in WWII that were being aimed at disused quarries in the region where the V1 bomb was being manufactured

Creil had a number of abandoned industrial sites in the area, but
it is making strides in urban renewal

Biggest duck I've ever seen

Saturday, August 27: This was supposed to be a day to get away from the churches, abbeys, castles, etc. and just have a quiet day along a nice quay in a small village. Unfortunately, our guidebook was, yet again, out-of-date, as the promised quay in Boran-sur-Oise proved to now be "private" and we had to move on. Eight kilometers further downstream we moored on commercial "dolphins" at the town of Beaumont-sur-Oise. For a 1000-year-old town it was pretty quiet, so we looked at a few of their old buildings, and then saw that it was Liberation Weekend. In August 1944, the city was liberated by the American army and the 2nd French armored division, and the event 78 years ago was being celebrated as part of the town's 1000th anniversary.

The poster advertising the event

There were displays of old jeeps and other vehicles, and people
dressed in American military garb

Lon talking with Fabrice, a French Air Force lieutenant who
was dressed as an American colonel. Nice guy

The skyline of Beaumont-sur-Oise and its church as seen from our mooring

Sunday, August 28: Last, but not least, we spent Sunday afternoon and evening in Auvers sur Oise. Auvers was the town where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final 70 days before committing suicide at the age of 37. He produced an unbelievable 78 pictures during that time. Boarding at the Auberge Ravoux, he died in his bedroom a day-and-a-half after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver one July afternoon on the edge of a wheat field behind the chateau.

Pictures he completed are displayed in the areas where he painted them

The medieval church of Auvers, and the magnet
I bought that bears the painting Van Gogh 
made of said church

The graves of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, in a
cemetery on the outskirts of Auvers. Theo died in Amsterdam only
a few months after Vincent's death, but it wasn't until 1914 that his
body was moved to Auvers

The workshop of Charles-Francois Daubigny,
also a painter and fervent supporter of Impressionism. Auvers
became one of the capitols of the art of that period

Our mooring on a quay next to a park was a nice place to watch the local folks enjoy a lovely Sunday afternoon. We had a few intrepid souls stop and talk to us. As we returned from our van Gogh walk, a music duo was setting up and sang English language acoustic pop-folk music for the next 2.5 hours. 

 "Sweet Blue" sang to an appreciative audience. Great music. I had hoped to
 buy a cd, but they had none on sale. Totally out of character for me, I invited them
 to the boat for a glass of wine when their set was done

 Sylvie and Peter on CARIB. She's a French
school teacher (of English), and he's British, but has lived 
in France for quite a few years

Our mooring in Auvers. Back to reality, on Monday morning,
Lon does spider web "search and destroy" duty before our
 final day of cruising for the season

We will spend the next few days doing "boat stuff", taking a day trip into Paris (Lon has been dreaming of French toast at "Breakfast in America" for a while now), and getting ready to exit France for about 10 days beginning September 5. It's a trip to the UK we were hoping to do last year but backed away from because of all the Covid travel uncertainties. We will spend a couple of days in Bath visiting with friends, and then we have 7 days in Cornwall and Devon, in the southwest of England. 

Details will, of course, follow.