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:

So many adventures! I had such good intentions of posting every day that I had wifi, but wifi on the canal was rarer than expected and then this happened:

I slipped and fell down the companionway and pulled the hatch down on my hand. Ow. It’s just cracked, so the worst part of breaking my finger was it meant the end of using my DSLR for several weeks. And typing was also a bit painful for the first few days. I still took lots of photos with my iPhone, though. What really killed the blog posting was this:

Well, not actually that particular meal, just the circumstances. When we got back to Paris and I thought out loud about going to the hospital to have my hand looked at, my husband mentioned that he’d been having some tightness in his chest and maybe he would go with me … to shorten that story, he needed an angioplasty. It went very well, don’t worry, and he’s feeling great now. I got to spend three days immersed among native French-speakers, which improved my fluency dramatically, and my vocabulary increased quite a bit. I devoutly hope I never need most of those words again, though. (“Urgences,” “soin intensif,” and “coronarographie,” for starters.) And apparently the food at Saint Joseph’s was excellent!

I do plan to post more photos from the trip – we went to a Burgundian vineyard, half a dozen cute little towns along the canal, two flea markets, and the medieval Hôtel Dieu in Beaune, and I know you would hate to miss all that.

Our complete “itinerary.”

On the first day of our canal adventure we piled 8 people (me, my husband, his parents, his sister, her husband, and our two kids) into a rented boat and headed up the Saône River.

The “Sanne,” our home for the next week.

We stopped for lunch at a lovely little restaurant in Chalon-sur-Saône, and did a little exploring in the heart of the old city. We’re finding that even this far outside Paris many (most?) shops and restaurants are closed for a long vacation, but the architecture and windy little streets are still novel enough to make wandering fun.

Many of the buildings around the central square are medieval – my best guess is that they date from the 1400s, but take that with a grain of salt. (To put that in perspective, the two reputedly oldest houses in Paris are about the same age.)

I can’t get enough of the doors and windows on this trip:

One side of the square is occupied by the cathedral of St. Vincent, which was a wonderful mix of medieval base, neo-gothic façade, Victorian statuary and stained glass, and even some contemporary stained glass.

My favorite thing in the whole town was this note pinned to the lectern (presumably by the priest.) It says, “Speak slowly.”

After exploring, we headed upriver to the Canal du Centre and the first lock of our journey,

then to Fragnes, where we spent the night.

We’re on a boat, cruising up the Saône River in Burgundy, so wifi is spotty and I can’t post as much, but I had to share a couple of photos today. We picked up the boat in Gigny-sur-Saône, which is just revoltingly picturesque. Weathered stone houses, check, lace curtains, check, adorable cats, check, tiled roofs, check… omg, I’m in sugar shock. And to just put it right over the edge, Sunday morning the village is given over to ‘les puces:’

I didn’t know whether to shop or photograph, so I did both, and I promise to do a full post when I have reliable internet. Bonne journée, mes amis!

Surprise, after all that walking, I’ve got a wicked blister on my toe!  Today I wanted to see  La Conciergerie, once the site of a medieval royal palace and now most famous as the last prison of Marie Antoinette, so I left my traveling companions at the Musée d’Orsay Métro stop and walked along the Seine to the Île de la Cité.

The Conciergerie was sort of meh, not worth a full blog post, so I’m just going to take you along on my walk, looking at the amazing architecture along the way. This is the Louvre, of course, right across the river:

And this is a snippet of the Musée d’Orsay, an excellent museum that you should definitely visit next time you’re in Paris.

Walking along the Quai Voltaire:

and the Quai de Conti

Crossing the Pont Saint-Michel, we walk past the Palais de Justice and arrive at the Conciergerie. The only remnant of the medieval palace is this wonderful hall, once the refectory for the palace staff.  It is about 10 feet below ground now, but was at ground level when it was built. Walking down the stairs into the building is a wonderful way to grasp the scale of the changes to the island since medieval times.

The rest of the museum is a series of prison cells reconstructed based on old diaries and engravings of various Parisian prisons. Marie Antoinette’s has also been “reconstructed,” complete with a regal mannequin dressed in black 18th century mourning clothes. I didn’t take a picture because well, do you really need to see that? If you’ve only got a few days in Paris, skip this one. Heck if you’ve only got a month in the city you could skip this, unless you’re a very thorough Marie Antoinette fan.

OK, back outside in the sunshine, heading over to the Île Saint Louis:

And back into the Marais district along the Rue Vielle du Temple:

Just off the Rue d.V.d.T is the Rue François Miron, where the two oldest houses in Paris are still more or less upright (they date from around the 1400s):

And this is on my own street, the Rue Saintonge, and I am supremely jealous of whoever gets to have their morning coffee on this perfect balcony.

Today started with a brisk walk from our apartment to the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, at the far end of the Louvre (right about where the Tuileries Metro stop is on this map):

No photos to show from the museum, I’m afraid, but afterward I wanted to sit in a cafe and recuperate, and my iPhone told me Café Angelina was only 5 minutes away. You’ve heard of the amazing hot chocolate at Café Angelina, right? It’s thick and whipped, and they serve it with a pot of whipped cream that’s as thick as pudding. I was there so late (7pm) that the kitchen had closed, so there were no pastries and I had to make do with macarons. Poor me!

The lovely Belle Epoque dining room was filled with a mix of French-speaking clients and obvious tourists like myself.

Afterward I thought perhaps I should head home, as it was around 8 in the evening, but just across the street in the Jardin des Tuileries was this:

so I had to investigate. It turned out to be the Fête des Tuileries, a traveling fair that reminded me strongly of our own Blue Hill Fair, if the Blue Hill Fair were laid out in a formal 18th-century garden.

(By the way, I’m awfully sorry about the obnoxiously large copyright notices on the photos, I’ve no idea why they turned out that huge, and it’s just far too late tonight to try to fix them.)

I did spot a few differences from the typical American county fair. One was the number of gambling opportunities. In Maine these tend to be lower key and run by charities.

Another cultural difference was the amount of clothing worn in the decorations.

Since this is an American blog, I strategically oriented the railing:

When I came to the end of the fair, I found myself near the Bassin Octagon, so I pulled up a chair and watched people eating ice cream and watching ducks

until it suddenly got chilly and I realized the sun was setting. Oops. So I headed over to the Place Concord to catch the Métro, and promptly got distracted by sunset over the Champs Elysées.

Eventually the sun set, and I went home.

I took a very long walk in Paris today.  I looked up at rooflines and down at paving stones, into shop windows, at the statues on the Louvre, at birds, at bushes, at windowboxes, at homeless people, at graffiti, at houseboats, and then I inspected the edges of the Seine to see if they could be beachcombed. (Sort of, but it would be seriously gross and would mostly yield cigarette butts.) If you had been here I would have driven you nuts. I’m totally beat, but wanted to share the day with you, so forgive me if it’s a little short on information.

This is roughly the path I walked:

The thin, squiggly lines are areas of tiny streets and alleys where I wandered without checking the map.

Our apartment (just above the black canopy in the photo) is in the Marais district, which is old, charming and full of interesting shops. The forecast was for thunderstorms, so I didn’t bring my big camera, just the iPhone. As it turned out, no thunder, just a few prolonged periods of drizzle. I got damp but not soaked, and the sun came out in between.

I eventually stumbled across the Galerie Vivienne, a neoclassical shopping arcade built in 1823.

 The Galerie is a bit worn, but still elegant, with wrought iron, glass, mosaics, and carved stone everywhere.

My favorite was the bookshop tucked away in the back:

I also walked through the courtyard of the Louvre:

 And back along the Quai de Conti:

There’s a chart of river floods inscribed on a building – you can’t see it in this photo, but 1910 is written at the very top of the building.

The flood of 1910 must have been extraordinary, because it is carved in stone at several points along the quai:

You’ve probably heard of the bridge that lovers attach locks to and throw the key in the river? Here it is, the poor old Pont des Arts, groaning under the weight of all that extra metal. A section of the railing collapsed earlier this year.

This is the Pont Saint Louis, which connects the Île de la Cité (where Nôtre Dame is) to the Île Saint Louis. The bridge is closed to cars and even on a drizzly day in August is a stage for street performers. Yes, he somehow got an actual piano out into the middle of the bridge.

I’m going to leave you with this image of a photography installation at the Sakura Gallery. Because even in Paris I’m not sure you can top that.