Canals part two, no experience necessary

Dear friends and family,

Rumor has it that there’s been a whiner hanging around my blog site. Hopefully he left for good. He should for heaven’s sake.

Update: we made it to the Mediterranean Sea. Crossed from the Atlantic to the Med by bicycle. Not a long distance, but an interesting one, by following rivers and canals the entire way.

I had planned this trip originally to start in October from Brittany, but a second bout with Covid postponed the start till November. I was thinking about riding down the Atlantic coast and then turning inland near Bordeaux, but with the later start opted for less stormy weather and a start further south.

Now, resting in an airbnb for five days in sixty degree F weather and with the sun shining to dry us after a swim off the beach, it’s seeming like a good decision. 

Last episode I talked about a plan in 1986 to bring the sailboat down the Seine from England. Since I never got to experience the canals this way, when it was time for a special trip for my fiftieth birthday, I planned a rental boat trip through the canals with former wife Nancy and special friends Peter and Glenda. 

It was surprisingly inexpensive to rent a boat for four people on the Canal du Midi. After arriving in Toulouse, the charter company took us by van to the first lock that had the Canal going downstream towards the Med. It was impressed on me in my studying ahead that the trip be downstream. This allows you to enter the lock at the same level as the canal, wrap a mooring line around a bollard, and let out line as you descend. The opposite direction would have forced a crew member to climb a rusty, slippery ladder with the mooring line to get up top to the bollard, a lot more challenging and certainly less fun.

Between the four of us that rented the boat, we had almost a three year old’s grasp of the language. We felt pretty proud of that until the representative of the charter company met with us on the boat and explained all the systems of said boat and what to do and not to do in rapid, unintelligible  (to us) French. He might have been speaking Swahili for our understanding and I suspect that he enjoyed our lack of understanding as he handed over the keys. 

Once he left, we figured out which button to push to start this craft and downstream we blasted off. The speed is governed to not allow any speed more than five knots, so blasted off is quite an exaggeration. 

It doesn’t take long until you get to your first lock. Now (2024) I noticed that there are green and red lights alerting boats when to enter the lock, but my memory doesn’t have any lights in it. Some locks were self tending, which at that time, 21 years ago meant once the boats where tied to the inside of the lock, that the crank would have to be turned by one of us to open or close the gate to let water in or out so the boat dropped to the level of the canal downstream. 

What struck me most about this rental endeavor is that then and still now, you do not need any experience or expertise to rent one of these boats. None!

Peter and I had loads of experience with driving boats and soon got the hang of handling a power boat on the canal, often in the strong wind. Other groups renting the boats on the canal with us less so. We often tied up our boat, then helped a couple of families on other boats get their boat from perpendicular to the canal to point downstream, which was a little like an old silent comedy movie, except we had plenty of sound between us and even more so, between the family members on the boat. 

The locks were staffed mostly by college age women for their summer jobs, sometimes turning the crank, but often making sure all boats were secure, and even pointing the correct direction before pushing the automated button on other locks. 

The lock keeper’s houses often had produce or gifts for sale and we practiced our French with them as we went.

This is not a fast trip. The locks were usually open from about eight AM until noon, then closed for at least an hour for lunch and then closed for the day normally at five PM. No exceptions. Total number of locks we went through was about 75 in a one week trip. 

In Carcassone, we wanted to get through the City locks and side tie for free past the city, to the bank, but at a quarter to five got a signal from the lock keeper that we would not have time to complete our transit, so we had to wait until the next day. That meant that we would have to pay the exorbitant mooring fee of probably ten dollars to stay right in town, which happens to be a town so beautiful that nowadays over four million tourists visit it per year. 

So, after tying up securely, Peter and I scurried over to the Port Captain office to pay our fee before they closed. We made it with minutes to spare and by now proud of our expertise in canal boat handling, strutted inside. When we approached to pay our fee, the  woman asking questions was able to stump these two macho guys by asking what the name of our boat was. 

We’d been on the boat for four days, and yet  we had no idea. We tried to point to it through the window and have our deflated machismo selves explain that it was the white one, right over there on the other side with the other fifteen matching white ones. 

Either from enjoying our withering egos or feeling sorry for us, she took our money so she could close up shop for the day. 

There was a lesson I learned that trip, not about being a macho boat guy, but about slow travel. (Probably haven’t learned the humility one yet). Since the situation forced me to slow down and enjoy the journey more than the destination it ended up being a trip that was really special for its depth of enjoyment of the presentness of the moments of the trip. I guess I have to ask myself why I need this forced on me. 

One of the greatest construction works of the seventeenth century built just to teach me a lesson. 

This trip by bicycle has us cruising along at often up to ten miles per hour, double the boat speed allowed by our floating cruiser. Not wanting to miss the enjoyment along the way, we have adjusted our route to weave off the canal path to ride through tiny villages, in the traffic they offer. Sometimes that are as many as five cars moving through a town!

Our navigation, which is a combination of Garmin, Komoot and Google for bicycles are all different so we have a choice of village or farmland, and we’ve alternated. As long as we have been headed generally easterly, with the short distances we travel per day, it doesn’t matter much which route. 

I really don’t enjoy the bicycling through larger towns. After the excellent bike friendly (bike lanes everywhere) Bordeaux and Toulouse, mid sized cities like Carcassonne and Narbonne seem dangerous for riding. 

That being said, the drivers in France have been as respectful of bicycles sharing the road as anyplace I’ve ridden and I sure appreciate it. 

Today is the friday after Thanksgiving. They don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving here but they do celebrate a special holiday that we have exported to France: Black Friday! Even in little tiny villages, the stores had signs we saw for the last few weeks advertising it. A good part of living on a bicycle is that you don’t want to buy anything non-consumable and have to carry it. How will I carry my new big screen TV?

Sending love,

Charley