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The Barge Trip Stephen:

We are now in Cézac but it is not the beginning, rather the middle.  The beginning is of course at Logan airport where we got our flight to Amsterdam.  I hadn’t paid much attention to our itinerary when we got it and so was horrified to find we had a five hour layover before our flight to Toulouse.  We took good advantage of it by finding some large couches upstairs and sleeping for a couple of hours.  The rest of the day was spent in flying to Toulouse and then getting a hotel, changing money, getting into town, finding out about the train strike, arranging to get to Le Segala the next day by substitute bus, calling home, and having dinner.

Le Capoul, according to the guide book is a three star hotel with a lively brasserie downstairs.  We don’t stay in three stars but we did eat at the restaurant.  It was great.  For me, one of the most important parts of a restaurant, strangely enough, is its sound.  I think it is created by the combination of three things; the right lighting, the right room architecture and the right clientele.  La Capoule had high ceilings with the tables fairly far apart, quite bright lighting and I think interesting customers at tables for four or more.  What you get is a background noise that feels like much interesting conversation that you can’t make out the individual words.  It had a vibrancy that could be felt.  Oh yes, the food was good, but not great.  Great food brings a reverent hush.  This was not a place of culture, but a place where culture is created anew by the interaction of the people.  I even remembered to go back and get my bag which I had left under the table.

Le Segala is a small town which has a restaurant, and an épicerie and a boat rental place run by Rive de France, which why we were there.  Because of the strike we got there by bus to Castelnaudary and then a cab back to the town.  Even though they had said they were ready the day before, they weren’t.  But slowly we progressed through inventory checks, a boat tour, and driving lessons. Then lunch at the restaurant and supplies at the épicerie and finally we were off.  We cast off, did a U-turn through the tree branches and headed back for Castelnaudary.  We were beginning a ten day trip on the Canal du Midi.  We would hang out in Castelnaudary for a day or two waiting for Linda and Sage Walcott to fly in and bus/train their way to us.
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Dawn:

It was a good thing that we picked up the boat rather than Linda & Sage because “Didi’” the mechanic who checked us in, spoke absolutely no English. Thank God for my French with its slowly expanding vocabulary, for instance “amarrer” is to moor a boat and un “balei” (pronounced just like ballet) is a broom...for the decks, for instance.

Day one was intense with Stephen at the helm and Dawn on the bow and stern lines for going through the écluses (the locks). Although my friend Susan had just been in southern France and said they were having an awful drought, we encountered an intense, soaking downpour just as we were going through a series of locks with two other boats, one occupied by two French couples, about our age, and the other manned by a swarm of young German men. The Germans kept hopping on and off of our boat to “help” with the lines, since it is really easier to have one person at the bow line and one at the stern. Their “help” became progressively questionable the more beer they drank. By the time the storm ended and my jeans were hugging me drippingly, they had all stripped down to their little bikini underwear.  Ah, the Europeans!
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Stephen:

The next day we hung out in Castelnaudary watching and trying to decipher a race.  It turned out to be a mini triathlon in two heats.  We sat in a quay side restaurant for about two hours as the contestants came and went in a totally, to our eyes, disorganized fashion.  What was most impressive was that they swam in the canal.  A few too may canal boats with two many people on them and too many marine toilets for our taste.

The waiting worked out because it was a lock holiday, (Pentecost) and we would not have been able to go very far anyway.

Monday came windy and moving the péniche up to Castelnaudary was fairly difficult.  The bow is very flat bottomed  and it is easy for the wind to turn the whole thing around, especially if you are in reverse.  But we made it and found a water hose to fill our tanks and a spot to pull up and wait for Linda and Sage.  Because of the railroad strike we didn’t really know when or where they would be coming into town.  No one we asked gave us anything like correct information.  The gentlemen at the train station didn’t seem to be able to understand that we were inquiring about trains from Toulouse rather than to it.  Just as we were leaving to find the bus station, a big bus pulled in and Linda and Sage got off.

After getting them settled, we went for lunch and found out that today was the real holiday and very few places were open. Also, tomorrow was the town’s regular day off, so after finding some wine, bread and cheese, we launched ourselves down the Canal du Midi for real.
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Dawn:

I was so happy to see Linda and Sage get off that bus after about ten French Legionnaires descended. I was definitely ready to share the responsibility of “crewing” the barge and equally ready to have some other “captains” take over for awhile. Those of you who have been involved in a theater production with Stephen as stage manager when we’re under great time/money pressure will understand how much “fun” it can sometimes be to have Stephen at the helm when he’s worried something isn’t going right! I know all you liberated women out there are wondering why I didn’t just take over; well, I did, but my mid-life shortness of temper combined with his fear that I’d crash the barge (which I would not have) made me give up the wheel in five minutes. It wasn’t until our ninth day out that I got behind the wheel for a good, long time and learned by my own trial and error how to steer that silly, flat-bottomed thing with the rudder in the stern and the wheel in the bow. Then I had a wonderful time steering it through one of the twistiest sections of he canal.

The countryside around the Canal du Midi is a wonderful combination of rural and civilized. The farmland, filled mostly with vines, is so carefully cultivated; every square inch of land is used. Big trees, mostly plane trees, have been planted evenly along the towpath next to the canal so one has the feeling of processing slowly through a canopied path of water. Since we were there in May, the canal wasn’t too crowded with boats. Those we encountered were piloted mostly by German, English, Dutch, or American groups. The French do this mostly in August, when there are nearly no French people in Paris.

Traveling with Sinda and Lage (as we called them one evening after too many Ricards) was a treat. They added another dimension to our experience. Being a professional chef herself, Linda’s knowledge of and fascination with food stimulated a more intense culinary experience than Stephen and I would have had alone. Linda’s first open air market of the trip was in Carcasonne. We ended up with a wonderful dinner that day of gorgeous sliced tomatoes, white asparagus, a nice green salad with a strong garlic dressing, local chèvre and other cheese, a country baguette, and of course a bottle of local red which cost $3 or $4!
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Stephen:
The Art of the Lock

Luckily, we had only to go downhill on this trip, so we had the easier of the two possibilities.  In principal it is easy.  If the lock keeper is expecting you, as the lock comes into view the gate toward you will be open.  All you have to do is motor in slowly, dropping the bow line person off just after you go through the gate or missing that opportunity, head for the side of the lock after passing into it (making sure not to whack the gate with the stern), reverse just in time to stop the boat, and then they jump off and wrap the rope around the forward bollard. Meanwhile a second person has jumped off, been thrown the stern rope and throws that around the rear bollard.  Then, if we are in a manually operated lock, a third person goes to the gate that we have just come through and cranks it closed while the lock keeper closes the gate on his or her side.  Once the upstream gate is closed, the rope holders get back on the boat still holding the rope that has been passed around a bollard.  Now the lockkeeper on his or her side and the crewperson or our side walk to the downstream gate and crank up the sluices and the water begins to drain out of the lock.  The boat drops slowly and the crew let out their ropes to compensate and soon we are down and the two downstream gates are cranked open.  The ropes are pulled in from the bollards, we give a slight push away from the lock wall and slowly motor our way out of the lock and pull into the bank a little ways down the canal to pick up the crewperson who was manning the gates and sluices.  It took about ten to twenty minutes.

Variations—

They were many.  An easy one would be that the locks were operated by electric motors, then we would not need to crank the lockgate nor stop to pick up the crewperson which could be difficult given wind or traffic.

Another one would be that the lock was the first of the day or first after lunch and the lock would not be ready for us.  We could sound the horn or pull over and send Dawn down to let them know we were there.  This made it easier later in that there was someone already off the boat to catch the rope.

The most common variation was that we were sharing the lock with other boats.  Nothing really changed except that there was less margin for error and the error was greater.  Many times we were in the lock with two other boats.  Usually it would be a gathering of many languages.  We could share the work if it was a manual lock and socialize a bit.

Multiple locks were in principle the same.  Except that we would keep the crew on shore and they would walk down with the boat as we motored out of the first lock directly into the second (or third or fourth),  which brings us to the supreme variation.

The jigsaw puzzle—One day while I was ashore and the lock keeper was filling our top lock with three boats, I walked over and noticed that there were two boats waiting in the bottom lock.  There was a moment when I thought that a mistake was being made, but then I saw the plan.  Once we were down and the gates opened, we would have five boats that wanted to change places.  Two of our boats would go into their lock, then two of theirs into ours, then the final boat would change.  The lock gate would be closed and water would be let into their lock to lift them up at the same time as the water would be let out of ours to drop us.  The two outside gates would be opened and the boats would be on their way.  It was fun and all directed by the lockkeeper with gestures to his multilingual charges.
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Dawn:

I loved to meet and chat with the various “éclusiers” (lockkeepers). As imagined, some of them were old men who looked like they had been doing this job since the Revolution. However, other locks were managed by young families, including women and children. One of the most surprising éclusieres was a youngish, slender, attractive woman, wearing black lace leggings, a skimpy black top and a large brimmed black hat. Stephen and Sage had to battle it out as to who was going to jump off the boat and handle the stern line at this lock!

One day, near 7:00 PM, the cut-off time for going though the locks, we approached a lock that was closed. As usual, I was sent ahead as the linguist to see if we could get it opened. I approached a man watering his beautiful garden on the right bank and began the conversation by complimenting his garden. “Moi, je ne suis pas l’éclusier. Vous devez demander a la maison,” He told us that he was not the lockkeeper and that we had better ask at the house. So I asked a kid if he knew where the lockkeeper was, and he said that he was “out.” So I headed back to the boat to tell the gang that we better plan on mooring right there for the night when the man from the garden came up to me and explained, “”Well, actually I am an éclusier, but this is my day off. If I open the lock for you and there are any problems, I will get in trouble for working on my day off. But you can moor right here for the night and I will open the gate for you at 8:00 tomorrow morning.  Do you understand?” Well, of course we understood; it was fine with us. What I did not understand was why he chose to tell me the truth the second time around. Then at that moment, the lockkeeper who was supposed to be working that day appeared and opened the gate for us.

The canal and all the lockkeepers’ houses were designed by one man named Paul Riquet in the middle of the 17th century. Each house is similar, with the same pale green shutters, but each éclusier does his own thing with gardens, climbing roses, sculptures, concessions of local products like honey and wine. One day, Linda ran up to the “lady of the house” to buy some goodies, but she didn’t have enough cash and couldn’t understand the amount that the lady was asking for, so as the boat was descending in the lock, I got some more cash, found out the total she was asking, gave her the money, grabbed the products, and jumped on the boat as it was descending to the lowest level in the lock. Such excitement!
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Stephen:

The first day Dawn and Linda became in charge of selecting the end of the day mooring position.  I had selected one, but it had been rejected because of large roots and too much shade.  So we backed across the canal to the sunny side.  It worked out great for the wine and cheese party that we had on the stern of the boat.  Linda and Sage went to bed shortly after to sleep off their jet lag, and Dawn and I walked up to the nearest gatekeeper’s house and on out to the road.  On the way back, we passed the open window of the house and glanced in at the beautiful armoire and drapery and golden glow.  A room that with the exception of electric light had probably looked this way for a couple of hundred years.

Our second day out we got to Villesequelande where we made dinner on the boat and walked into town which had a beautiful little square and a telephone which L and S used to call home, but not much more and it seemed deserted. We had not gotten very far that day because of the four hour break we took for lunch.  First, a nice walk into Villepinte to a épicerie for supplies, and then on their recommendation, to then town’s Hotel/Restaurant for lunch.  The first restaurant meal of the boat trip and one of the best.  Sage ordered lamb that was the best that I have ever tasted and the rest of the food matched it.
On the third day,  we got an early start and made Carcassone by 11:30.  This would be by far the largest town of the trip. . . .
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Stephen:

La cite de Carcassone, the largest walled town in Europe, is a top five tourist attraction in France.  We walked up to it and split up.  Dawn and I ended up taking a French language tour of the inner chateau given by a young, Polish woman in her first week of giving tours.  She spoke slowly and clearly and was talking about stuff that I had read about, so I had the impression that I could actually understand a foreign language.  I even began to hear the dates!  Her study was religious history, so most of what we heard about was the terrible religious conflicts that plagued this area for so long.  Down the road in Bézier (where Dawn and I would say good-bye to Linda and Sage at the end of our journey) is where one of the cruelest statements of war was uttered.  Simon de Montfort, when asked how to sort out the heretics from the believers in the recently captured town said, “Kill them all, let God recognize his own.”  Some of us remember an echo of this in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, she is talking metaphysics of religion to a crowd of tourists with cameras round their necks and tow-headed kids in tow.  Something about one group believing in the duality of existence and the other group not.  At that time, the distinction seemed to be enough for make one group wipe out the other’s town.  For those who want more information, search on Catherism or Albigensian Crusade.

On the way back, we found a small grocery store, and we stocked up on the aforementioned goodies.  Sage and I are now the wine guys, and we point and shoot our way to a selection of red and whites.  Preparation seems easy.  As many people as possible work as can find room and the rest hang out and do dishes afterwards. The cheese is great and after dinner we head for the nearest bar for Ricards.  We play the Gypsy Kings on the jukebox and see the biggest dog I have ever seen.  At first glance I thought it was a stuffed cow in the bar, but when I looked back in five minutes I noticed that it had moved, and then that it was moving!

The next day was fairly uneventful.  We stopped at the famous bridge where the canal goes over a stream, built in 1686, it was the first of its kind.  We were ready to be impressed but were underwhelmed.  On to a closed wine store.  Linda and Sage saved the day by walking back into Trebes where they found a lively little town and they stocked up on goodies.  Evening found us in Marseillette.

Before we had begun, I set up a schedule of where we have to be each night in order that we would do about the same number of kilometers each day, which I calculated to be about twenty.  I had no sense that we would have to stay on this schedule but it would let us know when we got too far ahead or behind.  So far Marseillette was right on schedule.

What was not “on schedule” were the bikes we had rented.  Only three worked at all and they weren’t great, but the fourth didn’t really have its rear wheel attached and we had no tools.  I had checked the bikes when we picked them up, but I’m afraid, a little too cursorily.  So, we sent the bike riders from the center of town to follow restaurant signs to find the best one.  There was a restaurant in town but it looked like a pizza joint.  I found one at the other end of town and made reservations for four and bicycled back to the others.  Dawn and I cycled and Linda and Sage walked to the place and had another great dinner.  Coming back to get our bikes afterwards we stopped and had a drink at the pizza joint.  We saw a dessert go by and had to have one.  A Champignon (mushroom) turned out to be a ball of ice cream topped by pastry, the same kind they make eclairs out of, drizzled with chocolate. Ahhh.  The place also taught us a lesson.  When we looked in we found the food on the diner’s plates to be just as interesting looking as the restaurant we had gone to.  In France, good food can be anywhere.

The next morning we followed signs for a cave (wine cellar) to do some wine tasting but were unable to find it so we headed out for our next destination.  Our lunch spot was decided for us by the lunch time closing hour of all the locks, from 12:30 to 1:30. This is, of course, France and nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the sacred lunch.  We headed for the nearest town which turned out to be Puicheric.  It was the first part of the lesson “If the locks close for lunch, so does everything else in a small town in Southern France with no cafés, restaurants or bars.”  Here they are serious about their lunch hour, not reopening until four or five o’clock.  It makes sense.  You open up in the morning so that people can buy things for breakfast and lunch and then you open up in the evening so people can buy things for dinner.  You don’t sit around all day in your store for no reason.  So the village was deserted.  Life is not Disney World.  No one had hired them to be “ a cute photo op” for us and they weren’t.  They just went home for lunch.

So we made our meal back on the boat and continued on our way, arriving in Homps when it was time to stop for the day.  We stopped short of about the first ugly thing we saw on the canal, a new metal blue pedestrian bridge that crossed the canal to a new marina built by one of the boat rental companies.  It was just a mooring pond cut into the canal and had only a trailer as an office.  Later, I found out that the canal had recently been made a national monument and I surmised that the marina had been built to beat a deadline on making changes to the canal and they would add the buildings later.  A case of getting a grandparent.

Linda, Sage and I went off looking for a market and followed signs to what really was a seven eleven on the highway.  There were people putting gas in their cars, traffic was racing by and we felt as if we had been time warped of couple of centuries forward from our eighteenth century existence.  We walked back into the village and found a mom and pop grocery where it looked as if they had been selling vegetables for a half a century but still couldn’t quite agree on how to do it.  It was a little point and shoot without our star linguist but we did fine.
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Dawn:

One of my favorite moments was a bike ride that I took alone along the towpath at Argens-Minervois. I went down to the next lock and then returned by riding through the vineyards as the sky was getting pink. It was a stunningly beautiful experience, perhaps made more special by my solitude.
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Stephen:

Saturday was a short day. We traveled all of six kilometers.  We had a leisurely breakfast,  stopped the boat for a recommended climb up an escarpment for the view, had a leisurely picnic lunch, and when we stopped in Argens-Minervois we pulled next to a portable restaurant where I had a crankiness attack that started over a perfectly terrible landing that I made and continued with the arrival of a DJ and his loud equipment.  I got over it eventually, especially as we decided to move the boat away from the music, and Dawn took me for a walk in the vineyard to show me the pink sky.  Yet the intensity of my attack  and my inability to control it surprised me.

Later,  we gathered for  wonderful paella dinner and dancing on the parking lot.  I love to dance.  I love to dance with Dawn.  We danced to the music that we liked and sat down otherwise.  Dawn and Linda danced together when Sage and I wouldn’t follow their wild ways.  The place gradually filled up, some of the people we recognized from either the locks or other restaurants.  A vague, small, floating community was forming even if we didn’t speak each others' language.
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Dawn:

We had been promised “flamenco” by the woman who was running the restaurant but it never happened, except for a little canned flamenco music. I was waiting for castenets, mantillas, boots, fans and guitars to appear in the parking lot...with a lot of hot, steamy dancing. Apparently the hot, steamy part was up to us.
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Stephen:

Sunday was a long twisting canal to Capestang made easier because by 9 AM we had gone through our last lock.  We were in the “Grand Bief”, a level impoundment of water 54 kilometers long.  The need to follow the topographical lines accounted for its twistiness.  Dawn drove most of the afternoon.  As I suspected, after five minutes she drove as well as any of us.  It probably helped that I retired to the roof of the boat while she figured it out.  I guess I can be a little too “helpful” at times.  The view from the roof is slightly but wonderfully different.  The increase in altitude is just enough to widen the perspective of the trip.  I don’t remember having any revelation about this, but hey, I got to see more.

We had another wonderful dinner in a wonderful town.  It was in the courtyard of a winery.  I had calamari stuffed with sausage.  The same family had been here since the sixteen hundreds, producing wine.  The owner pointed out the wall from the middle ages that had been built on a Roman foundation.  There is a lot of that in this part of the world, churches on top of churches on top of churches.  I suppose it makes sense.  If I was going to build a farmhouse, I might find a ruin, knock down its walls to use the stone, but certainly not go the all the work of building a foundation when there was a perfectly good one right there. I also assume that the Romans built foundations to last forever as never having heard of a Roman building falling down because of a faulty foundation.

Speaking of churches, Capestang had a church with the altar end almost solid stain glass.  And it was all original, which is rare in France because of all of the religious turmoil.  The bottom six feet of windows in Ste. Chappelle in Paris was destroyed by people with poles during the Revolution.  It came with a very gentle man who explained it all to Dawn.  Our first visit was shortened by closing time so we made another visit the next morning.  We also returned to the winery to buy a couple of bottles of their product.
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Dawn:

The church in Capestang was one of my favorites, partly because of its simplicity, but perhaps largely because of the personal guided tour I got from the old man who was its guardian. He told me all about St. Roch who was the big hero of the region, and walked all around the church, explaining what he knew about the artwork in every chapel. He asked if I was Catholic, and I felt apologetic about having to say that I was brought up Protestant. He didn’t seem to mind and said that he wished he could speak English half as well as I could speak French. He said something I have never heard before when we were looking at a painting of the Nativity. He said, “That’s Joseph, the father of Jesus.”  I have never heard anyone, much less an octogenarian, French Catholic, refer to Joseph as the “father” of Jesus...what a radical idea!

Anyway, he was totally charming, and the church was big and airy enough that his typically European body odor didn’t ever quite exceed the level of acceptability. I suppose we Americans are fastidious in some respects such as frequency of showers and use of deodorant. Stephen and I remember a very beautiful young Czech woman, for example, who managed the tourist information office at the castle in Prague, whose aroma made it almost impossible to hang out long enough in the office to read the map!  Ah, the vagaries of custom and culture!
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Stephen:

Monday is our last travel day.  The long windy trip to Capestang had recovered our 6 kilometer day,  so we had an easy trip with only the Malpas tunnel to provide a challenge.  Sage handled it with ease.  Only a 150 meters long, but built in such a way as not to provide very good sight lines of oncoming traffic. It’s a one-way tunnel.

Before the tunnel, we had stopped at a three star restaurant, but it was closed.  Probably luckily for us as it was pretty pricey.  As we sat on the side of the canal, which is becoming more and more Mediterranean as we move along, we had a small conversation with a boy on the bow of a boat moving up the canal.  He was practicing his English on us and I have never heard everyone of the syllables of conversational pleasantries that way I heard them come out of his mouth.  Sage matched him as best he could, syllable for enunciated syllable.

So suddenly the barge trip is over.  Dawn, Linda and Sage had a last dinner together. I pass on it to rest my digestive tract.  Then it is a flurry of finding, packing, cleaning, reporting, negotiating, paying balances, breakfasting, taxiing and then we are in front of the train station at Bézier giving hugs good-bye all around as the taxi driver surveys all, waiting to take Linda and Sage on to their rental car.

Linda and Sage, thank you and good luck on the rest of your stay in France, and now you know something of the truth gap between trip and travelogue.

Dawn and I missed our train by ten minutes and had an hour and a half wait for the next one.  We put it to good use in getting money out of machines, buying tickets, etc. Finding a wall outlet into which to plug the laptop, which had been stored powerless in a compartment in the barge for the past ten days, I began to catch up on the writing which had been going along as jottings in a notebook. Before long the train came along, and we began the “Tale of Two Cities, Montpellier and Arles” . . .
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