The Oise and other babies

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 champagne up here but it's very lovely.  At Pontoise we met our best lock keeper of the summer.  I called in asking to use the big commercial lock and he replied in beautiful clear French telling me the lock on the right would be ready in 10 minutes.  I heard every syllable.  Once we were in, he descended from his eyrie to shake our hands and tell us we had a lovely boat.  I told him he had the nicest French we'd heard in France.

The kids joined us a couple of days later, together with rescue Greyhound, Zara.  She's known as 'Zooming Zara' so we had to start keeping doors closed.

After the excitement of the beavers we continued east on the Oise through some beautiful rural riverscape with trees lining the banks and the odd small town.  It was relaxing and we stopped early each day to explore.

Jon got some driving in as we made our way through onto the Aisne, a smaller river where our lock remote control was delivered by a vending machine.  That put us back into smaller locks.

We spent the weekend in Compiegne which is a fair sized town with plenty of boats.  We came to the only chandlery that we've found in France so Rob went AWOL for an hour or so and came back carrying rope.  You can never have too much rope on a boat!  We were struck that the shops had become more affluent.

Time spent with Peggy was lovely.  She's a happy, smiley child and long may that continue.  We arrived in Soissons and moored for a couple of days while we retrieved the camper van and parked it by the boat.  It was another interesting town and we got to see more of it when Rob let Zara escape and she loped off on her own walking tour.  We followed her carefully and were impressed that traffic stopped to let her pass safely.  Eventually she went into a courtyard and spotting that we had her trapped, surrendered with good grace.  Phew!

And then it was just the 2 of us with about 6 weeks left to enjoy our return to Bruges.  But we still had plenty of fun stuff planned.