French Barge Canal Cruise Sept. 3 - 15 It's 6:15 AM when we arrive in Charles De Gaulle Airport. In two days we will join the TMCA crowd at Migennes for an unforgettable trip down  l'Yonne river and the Nivernaise Canal.  Our first mission is to get some sleep and get adjusted to the time change. We took the RER subway into Paris and got off at the Gare' du Lyon. (the Lyon's Train Station)

It was a three hour wait for the train to Auxerre. We had coffee, pastry, and passed the time reading and people watching. At Auxerre we took a long cab ride to the Mercure' hotel north of the city, checked in, and crashed for a two hour nap.

The hotel has a good restaurant featuring a selection of  regional Burgundy cuisine. The beef borginone was excellent, especially washed down with a demi-litre of house red. We slept till 10 AM the next morning... We awoke essentially over our jet lag.

The weather was off-and-on rainy. Needing some exercise, we walked 3 km to Appoigny, the nearest town. In the convenience store we bought a corkscrew and a moderately priced burgundy.

Further into town we found Auberge Les Rouliers. We needed to dry out so we went in for a light lunch. The servings we saw coming from the kitchen were large. We ordered the salad with seafood and I told Laurent, our  server, that we planned to split it.   I got a funny look as if to say, "really ... split it?"  The demi-litre of chablis was almost gone when the salad finally came. It was a masterpiece and worth the wait. Three kinds of fish, mussels, shrimp, a few escargot and a giant whole prawn topped a small platter of fresh salad.

We had plenty of food, but we saw a scrumptious pastry dessert filled with ice cream and covered with chocolate head for a nearby table.

"Garcon, si vous plait, one of those too, merci," I said in my best mixed French/English while pointing to the dessert he just served next table over.

He was fluent in English, and answered, "Of course, right away, will you need coffee?" There was a slight smile on his inscrutable face.

"No that will be all."

A few minutes later there was a loud crash as a wine glass, tapped by a passing server, hit the tile floor next to Marion. She immediately covered her right eye.  Laurent rushed her to the lavatory and I followed. A visible shard of glass was never found, but after several washings, and a lot of tears and tissues, it seemed to be gone.

The dessert was to die for, and Laurent was a charming host. You must visit Auberge les Rouliers when you are in Appoigny. Rating ****$$.

The rain stopped long enough for us to walk back to the hotel. We watched the US Open Tennis with French commentary on cable TV..  When the announcer got particularly excited and the ball finally went out on a close line call, he exclaimed, "No, No,,  No, No, No."

Sept. 5 - 15  Barge Canal Trip

Thirty four people were in the TMCA group. Eight boats were in the fleet. The boats came a variety of sizes from 2 to 4 staterooms. We shared a 3 stateroom boat with Ed and Dorothy Hearon and used the third stateroom to store luggage. The boats were well equipped but living on charter boats is basically "camping out in style".

Don Thomson, our cruise organizer will surely write a complete Cruise Report. This frees me to be less definitive about the logistics, the distances between (and number of) locks, and a full running commentary on events.  Instead I will cover the barge trip as set of five photos pages with commentary covering the following topics:

The People Pictures
The Boats and Locks
The Churches
The Scenery along the way
The Bailly Cave

This organization will make individual web pages load more quickly than a single large one.

Enjoy!

Special Thanks

Don Thomson did a superb job of planning and organizing the TMCA 2001 French Barge Trip. Leading this unruly crowd requires the utmost in diplomacy. We partied hard, drank a lot of wine, ate our weight in bread and cheese, and altogether .... we had a wonderful time.   He was ringleader in all of this.

Merci, mon Capitaine!