Our Italian Dream: The Canals of France

We spent one week in France on the lateral Loire Canal which as the name indicates runs alongside the Loire river.

Our staring point was Chatillon Sur Loire and our finishing point Decize...in between many interesting adventures.

We were joined on this trip by our good friends Andrea Stone and Moheb Moses. We rented a boat which was relatively new and reasonably large so there was enough room on board. A fore and aft cabin with dual steering either from inside or top deck. Plus, very important, air conditioning.

We would only travel between 20 -35 km per day, which was usually made up of a cycle into the village pre breakfast for baguettes and pastries, a leisurely morning, a stop for lunch at 12 noon (locks close for an hour), afternoon boating and mooring for the evening (usually achieved by 5pm).

We passed next to a number of interesting places with two nights spent moored in a small village at the foothills of the famous wine town of Sancerre.

Good wine and and an interesting town.

Here we are in the town centre.

And of course for the mandatory wine tasting. The lady in front was our delightful host and she provided us with great knowledge of the different wines and conditions under which they are grown.

The boat trip was organised through Le Boat and they were very helpful when things went wrong...eg flat tyre on a bike, air conditioning problem (although the latter took a little bit longer to fix than expected resulting in a final rebate).

We would usually have lunch beside the boat in a pleasant location. Carolyna and Andrea made great salads.

The bikes came in very handy for travelling to towns once moored or just sight seeing.

We came across many picturesque houses, villas and scenery on the trip.

We also enjoyed the lock experience. As most were manual locks we would drop a member of the crew off to help the lock keeper open and close the lock. We probably had about 25-30 locks on the trip.

Lockkeeper's house - they are very proud and had amazing floral displays!

I think we made it look harder than it really was.

But at times it seemed like it was coming from everywhere. How is Andrea going to catch this line?

Most locks were only about 2 metres in level change however we did get up to a 9 metre lock which really had a lot of water pressure.

We all shared steering duties and all navigated into and out of the locks. We had one day where we went over the Loire River on an acquaduct high above the river.