After Paris - l'Avenir

We farewelled the Seine at Conflans Ste Honorine, an important barging town in days gone by and according to our guide, a place bargees go to retire. The guide hasn’t been updated for many years so perhaps they retire elsewhere nowadays but there were certainly many unused barges stacked along the banks. We didn’t stop but swung around the bend to join the River Oise (have yet to find out the definitive pronunciation). There was a lot of commercial traffic on the Seine and this continued on the Oise. The river was initially a lot smaller than the Seine so we were up close to some large craft – a lot of ‘convoys’ (one barge pushing another) which are the waterways equivalent of  B double trucks with which Australians will be familiar on the roads. The navigation signs required us to change sides of the river quite frequently to give the ships the best channel which I found a bit nerve wracking as they didn’t seem to correspond exactly on the upstream and downstream banks.

Being on a busy commercial waterway means that you can’t just moor anywhere and consideration has to be given as regards options for overnight stops. The mooring places marked on the charts may be unsuitable for a variety of reasons; they might be taken already, have fallen into disrepair or simply no longer exist. Sometimes a couple of fishermen will have set up their lines and you would have to be a braver person than I to ask them to move. The only people fishing that look as though they are enjoying themselves are the children who invariably smile and wave as we pass – perhaps the older men (and they almost always are male) have grown increasingly morose with years of staring into muddy water and catching next to nothing. Anyway, when we set off for the day, we try and have a couple of options in mind.

Cergy, our first port on the Oise, was once a small village but in the 60s it was decided that it would become one of a number of ‘new towns’ to be built surrounding Paris to relieve the population explosion. The original village remains much as it always was with the usual array of shops such as a baker and hairdresser (more unusually its streets ring with the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer) but it is now surrounded by modern development housing a couple of hundred thousand people. Public transport wasn’t forgotten and an RER train can whisk you to Paris in 45 minutes – somewhat faster than the 2 days we’d taken. The port area is a fairly recent and is very pleasant with a range of restaurants and the oddly named English Pub which serves those well known ‘English’ beers Guinness and Kilkenny.

Our next stop was to be Isle Adam where Vincent van Gogh and his brother are buried but it was a Sunday afternoon and the pontoon near the restaurant was taken up by a couple of boatloads of visiting diners and the next pontoon through the lock was occupied by a courting couple – we’d sooner have tried to move fishermen. So, it was on to St Leu d’Esserent which initially looked fairly uninteresting having been badly damaged during both world wars but has an enormous, beautiful, ancient abbey on the hilltop which fortunately survived intact. Local stone of the type used in its construction was later quarried and transported by river from here to build the Louvre and other great buildings of Paris.

Compeigne, about which I knew nothing at all, was our port for a couple of days and turned out to be a very interesting city with an impressive variety of beautiful buildings from different eras. The grandest is the Palais built by Louis XV – closed when we were there unfortunately. Rob cycled out to the clearing in the forest to visit the site of the signing of the armistice of the first World War – the Clairiere de l’Armistice. There is a small museum in the railway carriage (a sister of the original) where the signing took place. (My bike has developed a recurring puncture and needs a new inner tube so is out of commission until we can find somewhere selling spares.)

We left Compeigne early in the morning knowing it was to be a long day. Arriving at the junction with the canal du Nord we suddenly and inexplicably made one of those spur of the moment decisions which may eventually have big implications. We were supposed to turn left into the first deep lock of the Nord. Instead we went right.