Finishing our Voyage with Grand Sights and Good Friends.

Friday, July 7, 2023--Aboard the Renaissance just past Gustave Eiffel's Pont Canal. Built to carry barges over the Loire about 125 years ago, the bridge, sometimes called an aqueduct, is only wide enough for one barge at a time.

We are coming to the end of five full days of eating, wining, sleeping, exploring and enjoying Western Burgundy in central France with our friends.  Tomorrow, we head home.  Since our last post we have explored a royal palace,  Fontainebleau, and its Equestrian Center where the French army trains its horses, walled towns like Moret-sur-Loing, a Sancerre vineyard and winery La Perrière, and a chateau La Bussière, known as the Fisherman's Castle because it was overloaded with every collectible fish tchotchke ever--until it was turned into a museum, and another rural chateau, Ratilly, turned into an arts and music center.  We moved up and down locks, reaching a height of 500 feet above sea level among the ponds and reservoirs that feed the canal from the Seine to the Loire.

It's hard to put in the blog the variety of cheeses we had for the cheese courses every lunch and dinner, but it was generally five or six different cheeses per day, ranging from ash-covered goat (chèvre) cheeses to two-year old brie to delightful cow's milk blues.  The wines, at four per day, ranged from Alsatian whites, Burgundian whites and reds, Rhone valley reds, Bordeaux Margaux, with a goodly number of Loire valley whites and some reds to fill in the "imaginary" blank spaces, although there never were any blank spaces.  Ben and Inma, our bartenders, managed to fill those blank spaces with adventurous cocktails after hard days of being tourists.

Hannah, the English chef, did fabulous lunches, ranging from gazpacho, charcuterie to grand dinners. The penultimate was maigret of duck, and the night before was veal roulade wrapped around spinach.  Desserts have included mille feuille with fresh strawberries, red currants and red raspberries, and a delicious rhubarb concoction.

Those frits we picked at the the fish chateau.  The gardens include a large section of vegetables and fruit. Jane  and John picked a basket of currants, Ben and the others got a nice selection of red raspberries.  The gardeners gave us the nice selection of rhubarb stems.

  Several activities were quite unique, like a visit to the home of artist Rosa Bonheur, a 19th century artist who was famous for animal portraits, influenced environmental art and herself had been influenced by Buffalo Bill!

Another was a visit to a winery in a limestone cave near the town of Sancerre. 

Compared to our trip in 2010, the canals  are very well maintained, even though they have minimal commercial traffic: often they only have four boats per day passing through the locks.  For the first few days we seldom saw boat traffic but as we moved south we passed occasional marinas and even an occasional work boat.  

Jane, who had opened locks on a previous voyage managed to do the same on this canal, which is mostly mechanized.

Because the side trips from the barge can vary at the captain's discretion, one trip that was new to the Renaissance was a visit to the French Army's Equestrian Training Center, used to train horses for use both in crowd control when necessary but also for French participation in horse events like the Olympics.  At Fontainebleau, the Army maintains stables for some 140 horses , training them and working with the soldiers who will use them and train others from the civilian population.  

We also stopped to see the town, Moret-sur-Loing,  where impressionist painter Alfred Sisley spent much of his life, a truly beautiful site.  The cobbled streets and the walls with their tight entrances were straight from the Middle Ages.  The town provides a copy of his painting at the site where he painted it so you get a view of reality.  

Another chateau, the Chateau de Ratilly, a small one, was a medieval castle that has turned into a potter's paradise, due to the excellent clay in the region's soil.  The owners of the chateau also arrange master classes in painting and regular art exhibitions and major music events every summer.  We watched with interest as one of the descendants gave us an exhibition of her pottery skills.

We completed our week with a jazz trio performing on deck. 

Our last meal was drawn in great part from the fish, meat, vegetable and cheese counters of the local market in Briare which we visited Friday morning with Hannah, the chef.

July 8, 2023--Saturday morning we departed the Canal by car, saying good bye and sadly heading to Charles de Gaulle Airport for the long eight hour journey home.  It had been a very full three week trip, much enjoyed.  Thanks for the week go to the staff of the Renaissance, Hadrian, Oscar, Inma, Hannah and Ben, and for the company to Jane, Peter, Valerie, Andy and David.  We look forward to our next encounters.

 

Aboard the Rennaissance, Western Burgundy

 July 3, 2023--Western Burgundy, France--We are aboard the Renaissance, a large luxurious barge for a week of wine tasting and excellent food as we navigate the canals of western Burgundy.  This is our third barge trip in France, all described in blogs from 2010 and 2018,. This barge is by far the most luxurious.  We have a king-size bed and a huge bathroom. There is an enormous salon-dining room, as well as a hot tub on the outside deck.  We will call this home till we leave France and return to Washington.

We met up with friends Jane and Peter, David and Andy, and new friend Valerie at the Hotel Westminster on Saturday afternoon, it now being Monday.  We had arranged to have dinner at a restaurant recommended by previous hosts John and Eric, L'Agrume, near the Sorbonne.  So we bundled into taxis to the Left Bank to find the place closed--perhaps because of the rioting after the police--killing of the 17 year old boy Nahel in his car in Nanterre, a Paris suburb.   After some walking in the neighborhood we found an excellent restaurant, with a Chinese chef married to a caucasian French owner, the Mortensen on Blvd. St. Marc.  It turned out to have five stars from many reviewers.  They managed a table for seven with alacrity.

Ben ordered a Sancerre and a red Burgundy.  Our menu choices were excellent, ranging from pleurottes and artichauts, to smoked haddock, tuna steak, vegetable pasta.  It was a true find considering that our original restaurant choice was closed up. 

We spent a lovely afternoon on Sunday walking through the Tuileries and sitting on the quay on the Seine watching the people go by and boats move up and down the river.  A plus was watching a movie being shot.  Not a big deal but a bit different.  John got to see one of his favorite cars, a late 1930s Citroën Traction Avant.

The Hotel Westminster where we stayed was expensive.  Although the staff was good, the place was overpriced. Our room was small, less than four meters (13 feet+/-) square, with what John considered racially objectionable wallpaper in the hall entryway, and a tatty amount of bashed paint work.  The window looked out to an airshaft and was covered with translucent sticky paper.  But, the bed and wifi were good and staff was helpful.   

As mentioned, many cities in France had been rocked for the two nights previous with riots that did significant damage to smaller town centers and looting in parts of Paris, including the exclusive rue Rivoli, over the death of a youth.  This particular shot shows where a car had been burned in Montargis and store windows covered with plywood.

One effect was that our barge began its voyage not in Montargis as expected, but in a quiet sheltered part of the Canal de Briare away from the town center.  We are now moving down the canal on the way to Fontainebleau, one of the royal chateaus in the region.

Last night we had appertif of chablis (white burgundy) followed by an excellent dinner  prepared by the English chef, Hannah. She is from London and the partner of the French captain, Hadrian.  The starter was a stuffed mushroom in a cream sauce served with a white burgundy followed by a main course of coq au vin, then three cheeses all local, and the dessert an apple crumble topped with vanilla ice cream and a strawberry.