Catch Up

Way back in October, at the point when we had finished climbing the locks of the Canal Entre Champagne et Bourgogne, I fully intended to write a blog post wittily entitled “All Downhill from Here” .  By then we had gone up approximately 144 locks and reached the town of Langres, a fortified city on a hill near the source of multiple rivers. (Fortunately, our friends Ted and Joan from Peterborough had met up with us at a town called Chaumont and were willing crew during many of these locks. )   At Langres we tied up and hiked up to the medieval town on the hill.  I can only say that after all the locks and the one kilometer walk into town, almost straight uphill, I was too tired to write a post.  That’s a less impressive excuse, however, when I admit that after reaching the pinnacle, Joan and the girls and I did a lot of very gentle cycling as we started to head down the waterway and Ted and Tom did most of the locking.  In any case, I failed to write then and am only just picking up the thread again now, four months later.

In brief, after our great ascent, we started the descent down the other side of the Canal Entre Champagne et Bourgogne, met up with the Soane , took it until it merged with the Rhone, took the Rhone to the bottom of France, headed west  toward the Canal du Midi, found out that the canal would close in a few days’ time (much to our surprise), parked ourselves at a town called Marseillan, enjoyed the beach on the Mediterranean for about a week (25 degrees celcius on November 7), flew home to enjoy Canadian medical care and apply for long term visas, flew back ten weeks later, and are now living in an ancient house in the centre of the town of Marseillan where the children are attending school.

The task of recounting memorable moments and sights over the journey to the south of France is too daunting at the moment, so for the sake of getting something posted, I’ll skip to the present for now and go back in time later. 

The town we’ve landed in is called Marseillan, not to be confused with the metropolis of Marseille which is a few hundred kilometers to the east.  We are just 150 km north of the border between France and Spain, on a salt water “lake” of sorts that is separated from the sea by a thin strip of land on the south east side.  The lake, actually called an étang, is just under 20 km long and supports a lot of boating activity, especially sailing, as well as oyster cultivation.  Our boat is safely moored at the town harbour, in front of a string of boat and sail shops, across from both a winery and a brewery, only a few hundred meters from the centre of town. There is even an aluminum boatbuilding shop on the edge of town where they build workboats similar to those from Metalcraft.  What are the chances?

Marseillan has a population of about 4000 people which supports an elementary school of about 250 kids.   Since we cannot start boating until the Canal du Midi reopens in mid-March, we have enrolled the girls in school and for the coldest months (currently between 12 and 15 degrees during the day and between 5 and 10 overnight) we have rented a house.  The boat is liveable during this type of winter but a little too wet to be really comfortable. 

Georgia is enrolled in the equivalent of grade three, in a class that happens to contain an American girl who has been here since September and has learned enough French to be Georgia’s translator until her own French develops a little more.  Emily is in the equivalent of grade five, a year below her age mates because grade six is contained at a different school and seemed unnecessarily ambitious given that our primary educational goal is learning French.  She has a pretty good foundation from Madelle’s excellent instruction at Marysville and is also keen to practice on DuoLingo on a regular basis (excellent free online language instruction – check it out at www.duolingo.com).  We accompany the girls on the three minute walk to school to start at 9:00 in the morning and pick them up again for a two hour lunch break from noon ‘til 2:00.  Then they return for the afternoon from 2:00 to 5:00.  For reasons we don’t quite understand, the school week is only four days long with Wednesdays off as well as the weekends.  They have a shorter summer break, but more frequent and longer breaks during the year than in Ontario.  For instance, the winter term goes from the start of the new year to the start of March when they get a two week break.  Then they go back for six weeks before they get another two week break.  In that session, Emily’s class takes a TEN day ski trip in the Pyrenees!!!!   (I may need to be medicated for this!)

Tom and I are now on our second day of life in France with six parenting-free hours a day.  It looks like Tom will fill this time fairly completely with Metalcraft Marine via the internet.  I will roam the countryside on my bicycle, trying find the routes that are least threatening to my continuing existence.  From the port in Marseillan it is possible to ride 6km to the beach (Marseillan Plage on the Mediterranean) almost entirely on car-free paths.  That’s it, however, for truly safe cycling.  We rented a car for four days over the last week in order to explore the area around us and discovered that the roads are very narrow and often fall at the sides into drainage ditches without so much as a foot of paved or gravelled shoulder.  As a result, my cycling tours will be an effort to find the less travelled routes where there just isn’t very much car traffic.

No doubt there’s a great deal more that I could say, but I’ll leave it at that for now and see if I can get the other writers in the family to add their bits.