15 May 2017.
Saverne to Xouaxange. 8 hoours, 33 kilometres, 13 locks, Arzviller inclined
plane, two tunnels (2,3 kilometres and 400 meters).
Leaving Saverne and expecting a long day ahead and hoping that we would not have to share locks with any ‘bumper boats’, we set off in glorious sunshine. The first lock, with its five meter rise, opened as we approached and, very gently, we rose to the top
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| The 5 meter lock at the entrance/exit to Saverne. |
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| An enterprising, canal-side venture. |
At Lutzelbourg we were joined by a Swiss boat
whom I suspect had been waiting for a non-hireboat with which to lock through and in no time at all we were at the foot of the Arzviller inclined plane where we had a short delay waiting for upstream boats to complete the tunnel sequence and descend.
Eventually, up we went in the lovely, hot sunshine
and arrived at the waiting quay before the 2,306 meter Arzviller tunnel where a Le Boat had plonked itself some twenty five meters from the start of the quay and we received some rather dirty looks when we passed them and moored up at the front space – all was forgiven however when we waved them through first when the lights turned green. And crikey, did they speed through! We all (another hireboat had joined they convoy) assembled again at the entrance to the 475 meter Niderviller tunnel, the light turned green and off we went again. The one hireboat stopped off at the Niderviller base soon after exiting the tunnel, the Swiss couple turned in at the Kuhnle-Tours marina at the town of Niderviller
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| Lift in at Kuhnle-Tours base |
and the convoy leader stopped at the Le Boat base in Hesse.
Determined to try out our new set of boules at the petanque court at Xouaxange we pressed on arriving at five o’clock to a packed pontoon and so we moored up against and old wooden waiting jetty
where we dared not walk across the 250 millimeter beams to shore, packed away the boules and broke out a bottle of bubbly instead!
16 May:
Xouaxange to Lagarde. 5 hours 42 minutes, 27 kilometres, 7 locks.
With a light mist over the water, we departed very early the next morning
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| Goodbye Xouaxange. |
and, being the only moving boat about, made short shrift of the fourteen lock-less kilometres to the big Rechicourt lock.
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| Passing the big factory at Heming |
After a forty minute wait the gates opened and we cruised into the bassin, were presented with our lock operating remote control, and in splendid isolation dropped down the fifteen meter descent
before making quick time to Lagarde – once again in perfect cruising weather.
After lunch Lynn went to the captainerie to do a load of washing and to collect our long awaited for paint and varnish but returned with the paint and some epoxy filler (which I had specifically told them not to order) – no topsides paint! Jacques, who was not in the best of moods, refunded us the €72 cost of the epoxy and said that his supplier had told him that the colour paint we wanted had been discontinued – why he never called us (he had our number soon after we received it in Strasbourg) thus giving us the opportunity to decide on another colour, I will never know. To give him his due, he did come by later to specifically apologise for the way he had spoken to us and did so again then next morning when he dropped off our Dutch bikes, and again when we departed Lagarde for the last time. Nice man is Monsieur Lucas.
17 May:
Lagarde to Einville-au-Jard. 3 hours 20 minutes, 19 kilometres, 5 locks.
Another
faultless day
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| Passing the Navig France base at Xures |
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| A catamaran going past! |
saw us effortlessly through to Einville-au-Jard, for some odd
reason, one of our favourite stopping places, ‘Odd’ because it is not very
attractive, has a fairly featureless nearby town and a lot of hireboats use it
as a first stop after departing Nancy.
But it is clean, has cheap water and
electricity, rubbish bins, showers nearby (which I have never seen) and a
restaurant almost at the quayside serving adequate to good fare at a reasonable
price.
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| Tete de veau - veal cheek. |
There was only one other barge moored there, Isselrust, a 1936 Dutch beauty which had really been beautifully
restored to perfection by its English owners but by the next evening there were
six boats in port.
This trip we
seem to have been pre-occupied with a plethora of mundane but time consuming
tasks: fitting a new kitchen downlighter, new lights in our cabin and in the
galley, trying to figure out the birds nest of wiring behind the old cassette
player and radio which must make way for a new radio with proper auxiliary
ports, removing the old radio (which had been cunningly anti-thefted with the
use of two, inch-long nails, almost impossible to see), servicing the wiper
motor which had packed up and trying to restore one of the other two which were
a mess of rust,
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| How the old one's look. |
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| The 'good' one being fixed. |
sewing a cover for the windlass, painting the diesel and water
filler-caps red and blue respectively, finding and replacing a blown fuse on
the toilet pump, putting on new name decals – the list is endless and our
sightseeing has taken a knock. With one major task to go (now that we have no
paint) we can soon settle down and enjoy life after Nancy once again. Now, how
do I get a power cable from the junction box, behind the panelling and
bulkheads to the fridge in the galley, without turning myself into a pretzel?
(No, I have no idea why this last paragraph is double spaced and I don't know how to fix it...)
Friday, our
last day in Einville-au-Jard had been set aside for exploring. There were a couple of small villages which we had passed which looked
like they might be worth visiting but in the middle of Thursday night the heavens
opened and the downpour continued until about ten in the morning when the storm
was reduced to very intermittent, hard showers, so all ideas of exploring were
confined to quarters – which was fine as Lynn had been suffering from a bad
head cold and used the day to sleep it off.
(Also experimenting with font sizes and don't know how to re-size on Blogger - next one will be Calibri 12)
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