Taddy Tales

Sitting on my back deck looking at the view.  There's serious history here.  No, not the chateau in the background although it's very nice indeed. The weight of history in this nice little village of Long on the Somme rests in the unremarkable bridge.  Built with concrete casting and a brick parapet, the town have brightened it up with flowers.  But traffic rolls between the 2 sides of the village all day and I doubt many stop to consider what might have happened here. The history I'm thinking of started on 20th May 1940 when the German army occupied the upper village and made ready to cross the Somme on their march west along the channel coast.  The French army set up on the long road approaching the bridge from the west in order to prevent the crossing.  Fighting reached a peak on 2 June when Captain Martel and his squadron of anti tank troops held their place as they were destroyed to the last man by the German artillery set up in front of the chateau....

We have spent the last 2 weeks in mainly rural Belgium, climbing the River Dender/Dendre and then the Blaton-Ath canal.  This brings us from the heart of Flanders to just short of the French border.  Tomorrow, we will cross the unmarked border into France and journey through Picardy. But, in a week when Belgium celebrated its national day, we've been thinking about Belgium as a country.  This is our 3rd summer cruising in this surprisingly interesting country and we've been struck by its differences.  Flanders feels like the assertive part of Belgium.  Its people speak Dutch and often prefer to speak English rather than French.  They are largest part of Belgium.  With a per capita GDP of €35,300, they are (on average) 42% richer than their compatriots in Wallonia who have only €24,800.  And they seem to have a strong sense that the Flemish fund the Walloons.  The Walloons are a bit less than a third of the population and they feel comfortably...

It's July 2020 and we should have been cruising for 3 months now.  But it's 2020 and you don't need me to tell you that 2020 is different from anything we've experienced or planned.  I'm not going to say the C-word but 2020 will be remembered as the year that mucked things up! Three months at home without boarding a boat was tough and when it became possible to return to Bruges and get started again, we packed up and headed for the tunnel.  We think we can manage 3 months which rules out travelling too far south but that doesn't matter.  There's plenty of lovely water in Belgium and northern France.  And we'll avoid the drought which is already plaguing central France. I say drought because we seem to have missed the best of the weather and I'm writing this on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Aalst.  I've been slow to start blogging again as I didn't want to complain about  . . . well, you know what about.  But this morning a fellow boater passed...

We chugged on along the Aisne on marvelously peaceful waters.  We had almost looped Paris and were headed back towards Reims.  But we turned north before that and headed uphill into Picardy to start our journey home.  The Canal de l'Oise a Aisne has just a few commercial boats and not many of us pleasure boats.  We climbed a flight of locks and chugged through a tunnel in splendid isolation.  It was a lazy few days.  Then we turned onto the St Quentin Canal and continued our climb.  One night we moored on an island and then we had this beautiful little 'Halte Nautique' all to ourselves. We found ourselves back on the western front.  The St Quentin was an important barrier and there are plenty of British cemeteries along the way.  We try to visit as many as we can because they are so moving.  We were also moved to find many New Zealand graves, a country that is special to us.  We moored in Marcoing right by the bridge that Henry ...

The picture is a little blurred but, yes, it is a beaver - or castor in French.  Two of them swam by the boat late one evening whilst we were moored on the Oise in quite an urban area and only about 50 km north of Paris.  We took this picture with a phone and have cropped it heavily.  But we were pretty close. This made for an exciting first evening for daughter and son-in-law Al and Jon who arrived in their campervan together with baby Peggy who was just 3 months old. We had turned off the Seine and onto the Oise at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine a few days previously.  That's an interesting place being 'home' for many of the commercial boaters.  There's a floating chapel and boarding school for the children of boaters.  There's also a lot of boats moored with retired boaters who have decided to spend their retirement on their boat. On to Pontoise where we were a bit dismayed to be the only boat on an 80m pontoon in August.  OK - there's no c...

Paris was packed with tourists all snapping the views and having a great time.  But very few of them were passing the Eiffel Tower in their own boat that day.  It felt VERY cool.  Probably the highlight of several exciting days visiting the city of love.  But first we had to get there. We cruised the lower reaches of the Marne which pass through the up-market southern suburbs of Paris.  Very pleasant but not many boats and just the odd commercial. The extravagant loops typical of the lower reaches of a river are shortened by a short tunnel at Joinville le Pont.  Everything changes as the river becomes very busy and quickly joins the Seine and you're crossing under the Peripherique.  We'd been joined by other pleasure boats and there were large commercial boats moving fast in both directions and passing under the many bridges.  The navigation instructions warn against stopping to admire the view.  I get their point - there's so much...