Aspirations for 2023

We have done our trip to Miami and have already received our passports back with our French Visas for 2023.  Plane tickets are in place and, I'm not sure about Pat, but I am counting down the days to return to C.A.R.I.B. III.  I wanted to take a minute to let everyone that reads this blog know about our cruising plans for 2023.  This is "Plan A", and most of you know that we have yet to have a Plan A work out.  So, Pat keeps referring to this as "Aspirations for 2023".

Below is a map of our current Plan A from our April arrival in France thru to the middle of July.

    

We will be starting from our current location, Port Cergy, just to the northwest of Paris.  We arrive in Paris on April 20th (Happy Birthday Claudine and Mecki!!) and will spend the rest of April getting ready for the cruise.  The plan will be to leave Cergy on May 1st and make our way back to the north on the Oise River (Red route on the map).  This, of course, will be based on the weather and conditions of the rivers (flooding or not).  There will be many interesting places to explore while cruising this route around Paris, including several WWI sites, and large and small cities such as Reims, Epernay, and Chateau-Thierry.  We will have a little over a month's time to do this since we have reserved a slip in Paris for the last 3 weeks of June.

We are really looking forward to our time in this neighborhood.  Many of our cruising friends have spent time at Port Arsenal and highly recommended it.  The port is also very close to my favorite breakfast spot in Paris, "Breakfast in America".  Here I can actually get French toast and bottomless coffee for breakfast.

At the end of June, we leave Paris and follow the blue route on the map southeast to Auxerre.  We were last there in 2017 to attend a "DBA" (barge association of which we are members) rally in order to learn about barge ownership prior to actually finding and buying C.A.R.I.B. III.

This picture is from the 2017 rally showing some of the 30 barges that attended

This time we will be attending another rally with C.A.R.I.B. III, and maybe assisting some new members get information to help them with their decisions.  The rally is scheduled from the 12th to 17th of July; therefore, we will not have a lot of time for sightseeing as we make our way to Auxerre.  We will be able to take part in Auxerre's Bastille Day celebration on July 14th.  This is similar to our 4th of July celebrations.

At this point, we have not made any further plans.  We will have to see what the conditions of the waterways are and determine where we will go at that time.  We do know that my brother Nick and his wife Wendy will be visiting with us during the first week of August.  So, most likely we will head back towards Paris to meet them at some town along the way, and then maybe head south thru the middle of France.  That's all to be determined at a later date.

That's all for now.  I'm sure Pat will be back to posting more blogs towards the end of April.  Until then...Cheers!!