Fragnes to Chagny on the Canal du Centre, Burgundy

The story resumes: We left Fragnes the next morning and spent the day cruising slowly up the canal to the town of Chagny. It was a peaceful, smooth, and except for the bustle at each lock, blissfully uneventful day spent watching cloud shadows scudding across fields, and waving to the occasional bicycle passing us on the tow path. If I remember rightly, there were 9 locks between Fragnes and Chagny, so we kept pretty busy in between long bouts of sunning ourselves on the deck. This is what going through a lock entails:

1) Wait for the doors to open:

2) Loop a rope (oops, beg pardon, I mean a line) around one of the floating bollards. These are pretty cool – they rise with the water level. In a lock with ordinary bollards someone has to climb a ladder set into the lock wall and loop the lines around bollards up top. Then you have to keep the lines taut so the boat doesn’t hit the sides of the lock.

3) Pull the proper rope on the thingummy – it’s at far right in this photo – and wait for the lock to fill with water. Wait while the doors open, and then sail forth into the upper canal. Here the doors are just beginning to open:

4) Hang out on deck and wait for the next lock:

5) while hanging out on deck, keep an eye out for bridges and sing out when one comes up (in the photo above, you can see one in the distance at left) because they are very low:

In between locks, we watched cows grazing in the fields next to the canal:

and spotted the occasional chateau in the distance (this is the Chateau de Rully)

Eventually we arrived at Chagny, where we planned to spend the night, and disembarked to explore the town.

I got very lost on my way back to the canal and sort of tripped over a campground at the edge of town. The camping spaces were separated by neatly trimmed hedges, so the place looked like a well-kept 18th century formal garden. So French! Or at least so not-American.

It being August, most of the stores were closed for les vacances, so I spent my time photographing doors and windows. Looking back at my photos from this trip, I clearly developed some kind of obsession with them. More than half my photos are of windows! Mais je ne regrette rien: I think they look very cool all lined up next to each other:

Love this sign – note that Popeye and Olive are clothing-challenged and have matching tattoos:

Me being me, I also found some French wildlife: I learned to spot nests of les hirondelles by the conical heaps of swallow poop below them:

and there were lizards basking in the sun on all the ancient stone walls:

I’ll leave you for the night with this too-sweet-for-words garden vignette, as we head back to our boat laden with bread, cheese, and ripe fruit for dinner: