Day 27 - Friday 27th May 2005

Another beautiful day.  We are doing some housekeeping this morning before heading off this afternoon for our canal tour.  The sun was hot so I sat under the willow with a nice glass of white wine and the paper.  After lunch we set off for Port Du Pouilly for our boat trip, and had to wait for a party of Germans before we set off. Noticed a circus in town and interestingly they were flying a Australian lag over their bigtop.  Our captain was Dutch but was fluent in a number of languages.  On the outward bound leg, he provided commentary in German for our fellow passengers, they all departed for their bus at the destination and we had a personal tour, with English commentary, on the return journey.  It was very interesting.  Much of the tour proceeded through the 3.5 km tunnel that linked the northern and southern canal networks.   The tunnel is dead straight and you can see the other end from the entrance.  The labour required to complete the canals and the engineering especially of the tunnels was amazing.  Twenty years after they were finished, railways were invented and that stuffed them.   We traversed a lock at the end of the outward leg then dropped off our Germans before locking again for the return visit.  I assisted the rather beauteous lock crew with opening the gates.  Because of economic imperatives, the locks, which had, a generally female, lock crew for each lock now have a lock crew for each 12 locks, they rattle back and forwards between them on Vespas.

We finished our tour, viewed the 1897 electric tunnel tug, then headed for Clomot.  Jude knocked up a wonderful dinner of local produce while I uncorked the wine.  We sat out on the terrace for dinner surrounded by birdsong, the weather is just perfect.  After dinner, Judy did a little gardening.