One of Those Days

It was bound to happen sooner or later. We'd been meeting our "aspirations" for the cruising season (well, except for the weather early on), and having a nice, relaxing boating and tourism experience, so it was inevitable that at some point something--or some things--would happen that were not quite the way we'd like. We could have done without that kind of "excitement."

When we left Reims on May 20 we had a short, 2-hour cruise to the village of Sillery. Our main purpose in stopping there was to have a night with electricity and water at their halte nautique, setting ourselves up for the following day and what would be a relatively ambitious cruise (24 km, 11 locks, 1 tunnel) to Conde-sur-Marne. 

Sillery itself was a largely rebuilt village, but they did have a French national
cemetery in the vicinity of the halte nautique. It contains the remains of
almost 12,000 soldiers, mostly French, who died from battles in the
 defense of Reims in WWI. Nearly half are unknowns.

All French towns were required to erect a war memorial after
WWI. Sillery's memorial was unique compared to any
that we have seen to date, and seemed especially poignant.

While in Sillery we were also able to cycle to the remains of a French fort just a few kilometers out of town. Fort de la Pompelle was one of several forts built around Reims after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Construction was finished in 1883, but the fort was never actively used as a French military base and was decommissioned in 1913. In September 1914, the invading Germans briefly occupied the fort until it was recaptured by the French in the First Battle of the Marne. It was then that the fort became instrumental in the defense of the city of Reims throughout the rest of the conflict. It was partially renovated in several stages and houses a very nice museum.

The fort was cleaned up and stabilized, but not fully rebuilt.

The entry to the front of the fort complex. The museum
entrance is to the far left. The photo below shows, from a
similar perspective, what the fort looked like in wartime.

                           

One of the museum's claims to fame is its collection of German
military helmets. It was extensive (and this is only some of
what they had).

Sunday, May 21, was a beautiful day for cruising. It was a bit breezy, but nothing too intense, and with little-to-no other traffic on the canal we were able to get through the first 3 locks and the Billy Tunnel with no issues.

The entrance to the Billy Tunnel, at the summit of the Canal de 
l'Aisne a la Marne. The tunnel is just over 2300 meters long
(about 1.4 miles).

One of the nicer tunnels we've been in, with 
well-maintained walls and lots of lighting.

The one glitch of the day came at the first lock after we left the tunnel. Locks 17-24 are in a chain, so once a "twisty" is used to activate the first lock, subsequent locks will be activated as well, and the boater is expected to keep moving until the "chain" is complete. When we got to our first lock of the chain, Lock 17, the twisty did not activate the lock preparation sequence. We had to tie up along the bank, and a trudge down to the lock showed me the source of the problem.

This hotel barge had decided to stop and tie up between locks 18 and 
17. The problem was that lock 17 was set for them to go through, and when
they didn't, the lock would not reset for us. A radio call to the hotel barge
(operated by a very nice British/Kiwi couple), and their subsequent
telephone call to the vnf, got someone from vnf on-site to
restart the lock prep process for us. It wasn't all bad--it gave us time
to take a breather after the tunnel and have some lunch.

By mid-afternoon we were tied up on a quay in Conde-sur-Marne, at the junction of the Canal de l'Aisne a la Marne and the Canal lateral a la Marne. Another waterway completed! After a relatively long cruising day, cooking dinner did not appeal, but the problem was that, as in many small villages, there wasn't a local restaurant. What to do?  

Pizza dispensers are a relatively 
common sight in small town France, and
 this was Conde's only "eating out" option.
 We'd always wanted to try one, so Lon
 has an optimistic smile as he waits for dinner. 

Out comes the pizza . . . 

And voila! It looked and tasted
 pretty good. 

Pizza was not the only item available by vending machine in Conde-sur-Marne. Right next to the pizza machine was the town's answer to the lack of a superette.

Conde's answer to the lack of a grocery store: a vending center
that carried everything from fresh produce to olives to prepared
deli-type foods.

The days of every village having its own bakery
are long gone. The neighboring village had this bread
and pain au chocolate dispenser instead.

We stayed for two nights in Conde-sur-Marne, mostly to just relax after dealing with that long tunnel and all of the locks of the previous cruising day. The major point of interest in the vicinity of the village was a pumping station used to help supply water to the canal summit.

The Tower of Conde sur Marne dates from 1869 and
was designed to look like the keep of a fortified medieval
 castle and a Roman aqueduct. It was a clever way to hide 
the pumping mechanism.  

The tower as viewed across the wide-open fields.

Resting complete, on Tuesday, May 23, we turned left onto the Canal lateral a la Marne as we left Conde-sur-Marne and headed toward the city of Chalons-en-Champagne. We managed to leave a bit ahead of a commercial barge (so it wouldn't slow us down) and encountered very little boat traffic on our 3-hour trip to Chalons. We did meet a hotel boat leaving Chalons, and we were fortunate enough to be able to stay in the space they had vacated at the city's halte nautique (which was otherwise quite full). 

Called Chalons-sur-Marne prior to 1998, it was in that year that Chalons-en-Champagne regained the name that it held prior to the French Revolution. The renaming was probably, in part, a way to "market" the town for Champagne tourism. Trading has taken place in the area since Roman times, but the most important existing historical monuments date to the 12th and 13th centuries and are religious in nature. 

The Notre-Dame-en-Vaux Collegiate Church is listed
as a UNESCO World Heritage site as one of the pilgrimage
churches on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route.

The Sainte-Etienne Cathedral dates to the 13th C, but the 
jarring baroque facade is from the 17th C.

The town had a lovely medieval center, with winding narrow streets and lots of timbered buildings. Slightly outside the center, and taking advantage of the canals and rivers, were three fabulous parks.

The Chateau du Marche was built utilizing part of an old
fortified bridge, and was developed at the end of the 
19th century as a bank.

A timbered building along the Nau River.

A bit of history of interest to Americans: the red, white, and blue poles on the sidewalk to the right in this photo were part of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the selection of the American unknown soldier from WWI. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery had its genesis in WWI. The War Department ordered the selection of an unknown soldier from those buried in France. Four unknowns were exhumed, one from each of the four American cemeteries in France. In October 1921, the final selection of the unknown was made at this site in (at that time) Chalons-sur-Marne.

We used our visit to Chalons to partake of a tour and tasting at the one remaining champagne house in Chalons. The Joseph Perrier Cellars was founded in 1825, and its cellars are found in former Gallo-Roman chalk quarries carved into the hillside. We will never be connoisseurs, but it was a fun way to spend a part of an afternoon.

A walkway through the cellars, with much better
lighting than they would have had in Roman times.

Lon relaxing prior to the start of our tour. We were the only two
people on the English-language tour.

Marketing to build the champagne brand.

When we arrived in Chalons we encountered boating acquaintances on two different boats: Stan and Sharon (from California) on Encore, and Guy and Ardon (from Australia) on Vindi. Both couples are part of the barge association we belong to. We had met Stan and Sharon at a barge rally in the city of Auxerre in 2017, when we were still in the hunt for a boat. We met Guy and Ardon in 2019 when we were cruising through Besancon, and again in 2021--only in briefly in passing--when we were on the Meuse River.

Guy and Ardon shared Happy Hour with us on C.A.R.I.B. III.
 It was fun to catch up.

When we left the quay the morning of March 25 we had to go "up canal" for a short bit so that we could turn around and drive past an electronic detector that would trigger the lock preparation, and allow us to backtrack along the route we'd used to arrive in Chalons two days previously.

On the left, the view back toward the lock (visible) and our mooring quay (not visible), which was the direction that we ultimately wanted to go when leaving Chalons. The area to the right was shallow and not navigable for us past a line strung across the water at about the level of the small boats seen in the trees.

When we reached this wide part of the canal, Lon, driving from inside because it was a cold morning, began the forward-back, forward-back maneuvering needed to get the boat turned. All was well until the "back" stopped working. Uh-oh. I was outside at the front of the boat and heard him say "I lost reverse". Nor could he get the transmission back into neutral, so we were moving slowly toward the barrier line. He ran to the back of the boat to drop the rear anchor but had difficulty seeing if it was deployed. He told me to get the flybridge driving controls installed, and while I was doing that (adrenaline fueled a faster installation than I had ever done before), he went to the front of the boat to try to get the front anchors down. Before he could accomplish that I was able to confirm to him that the back anchor had deployed. He watched the bow of the boat just "kiss" the barrier line and then stop. Whew! He went down into the engine room and had to manually put the engine into neutral so that we could switch to the flybridge controls (which use a different set of cables). We decided that we could proceed with our cruising day from the flybridge, and he would do more troubleshooting when we arrived at our destination for the day.

It took a while for our heart rates to get back to normal. We had one additional "glitch" in the day further along the canal, in that a boat ahead of us appeared to trigger a lock malfunction which delayed us for an hour or so until we could get vnf assistance to reset the lock mechanisms.

Needless to say, we were very glad when we tied up for the day. A bit of a challenging day on the water, but we had reasons to be very grateful: we didn't stray into the non-navigable water and go aground, and Lon's mechanical know-how diagnosed the transmission problem as a loose clamp rather than a broken cable. The loose clamp he was able to fix; a broken cable would have required the services of a mechanic with specialized tools.

Here's hoping less "exciting" days lie ahead. 

Update to Previous Post

 In the last post, Pat had a picture of our mooring spot in Reims with a commercial passing by.  She mentioned that at one point we had 2 commercials meet by us.  Here is a video of that moment:

Coronation City

On a cool, but sunny Tuesday morning (May 16), we passed through the last lock of the Aisne lateral canal, turned south, and entered the first lock on the Canal de l'Aisne a la Marne. We would ultimately need to pass through 10 locks on the 25 kilometers to our destination of the day, the city of Reims. No longer dependent upon a remote-control device (telecommande) to operate the locks, we were now back to the technology that we used on the Saone River during our first full cruising season in 2019--the perché; or as we liked to call it, the "twistee".

Twistee to the left, instructions to the right. The boat is lined up with the dangling pole, the
crew member grabs it in passing and gives it a slight counterclockwise twist to activate the lock.

On this particular waterway, the locks operate in chains. This means that for some combinations of locks, a single "twistee" will start the process for the first lock, and a motion detector at the lock exit will signal the next lock in the chain to prepare for the boat. The technology seems to be sophisticated enough to keep track of multiple boats using a chain of locks at the same time. 

With automated lock technology, lock keepers are
no longer needed at each lock. Sometimes the former
residences are sold and repurposed as homes, but sadly,
that was not the case for this derelict building.

The area immediately around the canal is flat and agricultural,
although it wasn't long before we were seeing hillsides in the
near distance. After all, this is grape-growing region as well.

We didn't encounter much other boat traffic on our way to Reims, so we got through the 10 locks of the day pretty quickly, and were moored before 2 p.m. 

Our mooring along a quay just downstream from the municipal marina. The marina was
not able to accommodate boats our size, so we grabbed a spot along a quay opposite a park,
and with a front-row view of passing traffic. On one day our Happy Hour entertainment was
two commercial barges meeting just as they were passing us--very close and very exciting! 

Reims got its start over 2000 years ago as a Roman town, but its surpassing importance in French history is that it became the Coronation City for French kings. The tradition goes back to the baptism of Frankish king Clovis by Saint Remi in the 5th century. The concept of monarchy as "divine right" became established when more Frankish noblemen were converted to Christianity. 

Coronation ceremonies in the current Reims Cathedral took place from the 12th century onwards. The Archbishop of Reims at the time claimed that one of two small, empty vials with aromatic scents that had been found in the recently-opened sepulchre containing the body of St. Remi had held the miraculously-supplied oil used to baptize Clovis.  Therefore, it must naturally follow that Reims should be recognized as the divinely chosen site for all the subsequent anointings of French kings. Thus was born the "Legend of the Holy Ampulla", just in time for the coronation of Louis VII in 1131.

The list of kings whose coronations were held in 
Reims. The lower list is that of the kings whose
ceremonies took place in the current (13th C.) cathedral.

The fate of the second vial is unknown. The "Holy Phial" was publicly destroyed in 1793 by French revolutionaries, but the day before the destruction, the oil was removed and distributed for preservation. As well, some fragments of glass from the destroyed vial were retained and were used in a new reliquary made for the coronation of the last king of France, Charles X, in 1825.

During WWI, the Germans briefly occupied Reims, but were driven out within a relatively short time. However, they remained very close, and Reims was repeatedly shelled during the war. Ultimately, of the over 14,000 buildings in the city, nearly 8,000 were completely destroyed, and only 60 were considered to have survived the war intact. The Cathedral was one of the victims of the bombings. Specifically targeted by the Germans, on September 19, 1914, the Cathedral was struck by shells and began to burn. Ultimately, the disaster spread throughout the city center. The French were horrified at the damage deliberately done to their cultural icon, and the event served as the basis for much anti-German propaganda.

East (back) and north views of the Cathedral. In the left of the
photo is the exterior of the Palace of Tau, the former palace of
the archbishops of Reims, and the residence of the Kings of 
France during their coronations. It was closed for renovations.

The West (front) facade of Notre-Dame de
Reims.

Lon by the ruins of the 12th century Treasury house,
now housing a cultural center; Cathedral in the background.

Angel figurines surrounding the main entry to the Cathedral,
including (on the right) the famous "Smiling Angel", which
came to represent the martyrdom of the city.

Tied in with all of the coronation business is another large, historic religious building. The Romanesque-Gothic Saint-Remi Basilica was built from the 11th C onwards. It was created to house the Holy Ampulla and the remains of Saint Remi. It was also badly damaged in WWI.

The interior of the Basilica was light and bright,
due to the white stone and all the windows.

Last year we watched a light show projected on the exterior of the Cathedral in Amiens. It turns out that light shows are a big thing during the summer in France.  In Reims, both the Cathedral and the Basilica have light shows in the summer. As luck would have it, the Basilica light show started on the 18th. They had a few technical problems on their first show of the season, and our experience was just so-so compared to what we saw in Amiens. We didn't stay in town long enough to see the Cathedral show.

The facade of the Basilica in daylight.

Not all is ancient history. It was to Reims in 1945 that General Dwight Eisenhower moved the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in order to be closer to the fighting taking place on the Ardennes front. In a room in the headquarters on May 7, 1945, at 2:41 a.m., the unconditional surrender of the German army was signed, to be effective May 8.

SHAEF was installed in part of the building complex that
housed the College Moderne et Technique de Reims. A high
 school has taken over most of the buildings now, with
 this small section preserved as Museum of the Surrender.

The room where the surrender was signed, kept in its original state.
 This had been the operations room (War Room) of the General
 Staff, hence, all the maps.

With all of the destruction from war, something had to replace the destroyed buildings. Given the time period in which the post-WWI reconstruction took place, the city now has a treasure trove of Art Deco buildings.

Thursday, May 18, was the French public holiday of Ascension Day. For a country with such an anti-clerical background and a strict separation of church and state, there are a lot of religious holidays. Nevertheless, it was a "day to play" for many French, and the weather cooperated.

Central Reims has a lovely pedestrian zone filled with stores
and places to eat and drink. 

We took advantage of being in a city with a train station to get out of town that day and see a bit more of France "off canal." Rather than exploring the Chemin des Dames WWI battle sites, we opted for a 45-minute train ride northwest of Reims to the medieval town of Laon, perched atop a hill on the flat Picardy plain. 

Laon was of strategic importance since Roman times.  It was one of the principal towns of the Franks, and the principal town of the Carolingians. It ceased to be the seat of a bishop during the French Revolution. Although it sustained some damage in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war, it was occupied by the Germans throughout most of WWI, and was thus spared the damage incurred by other towns in the area that were more centered on the fighting. As a result, the medieval feeling and layout remains, with losses of historic buildings over the years due more to sometimes short-sighted "urban renewal" than to war damage. Most of the medieval buildings date to the 12th and 13th centuries. We had limited time, so we had to confine our explorations to the areas in relatively close proximity to the cathedral. We would have loved to have walked around the entire ramparts, but the 3.7 mile loop trail was not to be.

Since the old city is on a hilltop, there
 has to be a way up. The busses didn't
 seem to be running from the train station,
 so we had to resort to the 265 steps
 of the Municipal Staircase. 

A rest stop halfway up seemed like
a good idea to Lon.

When the stairs ended, there was still
a walk up a steep path to be navigated. From
1989-2016 the city had a cable-driven
people mover to run from the rail station to
the upper town, but it fell victim to 
budget and cost concerns.

Laon was a fortified town, and has retained most of its
ramparts, which developed over the period from the 9th to
the 13th centuries. Tied into these walls (seen to the right in the
photo) is one of the old city gates, the Ardon Gate (center).

Another day, another huge Notre-Dame cathedral. It
was completed in an amazingly short period of time,
from 1150-1180. The cathedral and its 5 towers
supplied the design inspiration to the architects of other
cathedrals, including that of Reims. Just to the right
 of the cathedral is what remains of the 12th century
 Hotel Dieu hospital, the oldest one of its kind in
 France. It currently houses the Laon Tourist Office.

The main shopping street of Laon.

What would a medieval town be without narrow
passages to explore?

Sightseeing done, we were left with more mundane concerns, such as how to get the best "pop" out of our popcorn. In Florida we have a silicone popper that works fantastically in the microwave, so we bought one to bring to France. It doesn't work nearly as well here, and we're not quite sure why, but perhaps our microwave just doesn't have the "juice" of our U.S. microwave. So, we decided to retire it and go back to the air popper we bought in 2019. We originally got away from the air popper because it had a tendency to spew kernels every which way, but Lon has developed a solution to that problem.

No, Lon is not genuflecting to the corn popper or
trying to warm his hands. It's just his way of
keeping the kernels contained without burning
himself. It's pretty effective!

We left Reims on Saturday, May 20, without having explored its "Champagne City" aspect. It's not a big priority for us, but "when in Rome . . ." As we are just entering champagne country, we hope to have the opportunity to investigate this aspect of French culture in the coming days. But that will be a story for another day . . .