Friday 23rd August
We have now had to return the boat and will soon, Ryanair willing, be back home. At the end of this blog I will summarize what we thought of our holiday but before that there are a few things which I have not mentioned previously that I would like to get off my chest. We have realised it is over 25 years since we had a holiday in France, I have been a few times since for work as well as a chaps walking week and we have driven through on the way to other countries but nothing else. So what has changed?
Dog Shit: It is everywhere. The local authorities have put up signs, nice poo bag dispensers etc to no avail, French dog owners allow their dogs to crap where they like and they make no attempt to clean it up. Some trendy people carry a poo bag as an accessory to wave around with the lead but we have not seen anyone use one.
Credit Cards: Years ago the French were way ahead of us in accepting credit cards. Supermarkets in the UK would not accept them but in France everywhere did. This time we have encountered quite a few businesses which either don't take them or make some excuse “our machine is broken etc” such that you have to pay in cash. Presumably this is either a tax fiddle or the commission charges are too high, I suspect the former.
Wi-Fi: Obviously 25 years ago there was no Wi-Fi or internet but it is surprising how few places offer it. I had more success updating my blog on the walk to Everest Base camp in Nepal than here in “civilised” France. I can only assume that mobile data is so cheap and the bandwidth so good that no one needs Wi-Fi but it does seem odd that places don't offer it, a couple of times we chose a restaurant or cafe because it did.
Public Workers: I have already mentioned the lock keepers being, for the most part, unhelpful and miserable. A few days ago one young woman keeper kept us waiting in the lock for 5 minutes just to make sure she could not take the boat coming upstream before lunch thereby wasting 5 minutes of our time and an hour of the other boats. This negativity seems to be right across the public sector. The Port Captains (the clerks who look after the mooring fees) are also difficult and pedantic. We tried to visit a museum in Castelnaudary; queue of locals outside ready for the 2.30 opening only it didn't, no sign to say why, eventually everyone shrugged their shoulders and walked off. According to the paper it is impossible to sack a public worker and there are currently over 400 who have not been to work for over 10 years but who are still on full pay. Hardly an incentive to work hard. President Macron is trying to change the law so their salary goes down 10% each year but is meeting resistance.
Restaurants: We ate in on two nights which means we must have had 28 meals out. The general standard is still good, we benchmark eating out against the Three Tuns, not because it is exceptional but we eat there a great deal and the standard is fairly consistent, most meals in France have been better but we only found two places that were close to the Checkers, Montgomery or the Coach House in Norbury.
Perhaps the standard in England has risen so that meals in France no longer seem much better. One of the two really good ones motto was “An Adventure in Gout”! That at least is how we translated it.
A big difference is that most restaurants offer beefburgers, this would have been a taboo 25 years ago but now seems the norm (we are talking nice beefburgers with real meat). Restaurant prices are higher than at home, most meals were 70-100€ for the two of us with wine, the Tuns would be £60.
Quite a few villages, even quite large ones, no longer have a restaurant, cafe or bar. Fortunately we hired bikes with the boat and this gave us a wider range to seek out places to eat and other boaters pass on intelligence about where to get a nice meal. Those restaurants that are open are incredibly busy. August is the peak season of course but we very quickly learnt that as soon as we moor up each evening the first priority is to book a table for dinner.
Every evening for the past three weeks the restaurants we have been in were full and turning away potential customers, in some cases 10-20 diners. Why don't the French book in advance? In the towns they can go elsewhere but in villages (where we were most of the time) there are no alternatives.
In the past you always kept your knife and fork between courses, no idea why but it was what you did. Now you put the cutlery to one side and the waiter grunts and collects them up with the plates. Next night you put them on the plate and guess what, the waiter grunts and puts them back on the table for the next course. With luck you notice what happens on other tables and follow suit but there does not seem to be a convention.
On a number of occasions the waiter has asked “A la Carte or Plate du Jour” and we have not really understood the reason for the question, surely it is a billing issue but no, on almost the last night we got a waiter whose English was good enough to explain why – if you opt for the menu of the day you get smaller portions which probably makes it not worthwhile (actually more profitable for the restaurant).
Unless you like pizza there are very few vegetarian options and vegans are unlikely to be able to eat out.
Food: We had bread and cheese most lunchtimes with a glass of wine. The cheese is brilliant, probably half the price of the UK and a good variety, we selected different ones each day at random, normally those whose names we did not recognise and they were all good. So long as you stick to a diet of wine and cheese you can live very cheaply in the south of France.
In fact all the milk ends up in cheese, ordinary fresh milk is hard to find even in a supermarket where they will only have a few bottles and only one restaurant gave us butter with the bread.
Wine: 25 years ago the cheap wine was awful, the house carafe or supermarket special offers were, to our taste, undrinkable. This is no longer the case, we have had some perfectly drinkable house reds and the 4-5€ wines in the supermarket are fine. Wine in a carafe is always good value, the wines in bottles seem very expensive, the mark up is huge yet most French seem to go for bottles. Or perhaps being old we are less fussy but I don't think that's the case.
Breasts: 25 years ago when a French woman got anywhere near water she took her top off. Canoeing down the Dordogne everyone was topless, our 8/10 year old sons eyes were out on stalks and their dad also rather enjoyed the scenery. Now not a single nipple in sight – why?
Churches: Every village or town of course has at least one church. The small ones are quite nice although we found very few open to visitors. The large ones, Beziers, Narbonne and Capestang are huge but very ugly as you can see below.
Thoughts on the Holiday
Over the years we have had a number of boating holidays. Two on the River Shannon and one in Holland in the 80's were probably the most memorable but all were enjoyable. It is a relaxing activity holiday, there is always something to do, being outside all the time is good (providing it does not rain), there is a sense of achievement when you navigate a difficult bit of river or Loch or tackle a long flight of locks but it is also very slow and relaxing. Last year at two days notice we hired a narrow boat in Shropshire. It reminded us how much we had enjoyed boating holidays in the past so in mid July when I was getting cold feet over driving round Europe at the height of summer we booked this trip.
We knew nothing about the history of the canal, which was a pleasant surprise, nor much about the places we were likely to visit. Nor did we really think about the type of boat to hire, we only wanted something for the two of us and prefer steel to plastic construction but having a traditional English narrow boat did make us something of a novelty which added to the fun.
We covered 467km at an average speed of 4kph and just over 4 hours motoring per day which is just about enough. It has turned out to be an enjoyable four weeks (plus a few days in Montpellier), we were very lucky that for reasons previously mentioned the canal is very quiet, only on one occasion did we have to queue for a lock (i.e. wait until boats in front of us have gone through and the lock filled/emptied again). Considering we have passed through over 120 locks this is remarkable. In hindsight we should have pushed for a bigger discount or rung round all the yards for a better deal.
We had two days when it rained a little (the first day on the boat which was a little worrying) but most of the time it was a bit too hot.
Public sector workers apart, everyone else was helpful and friendly (there were one or two cheerful lock keepers and you are so surprised when you find them you think they imposters). In the past we have found that the French were intolerant of our awful pigeon French but this is no longer the case.
Now it is back home ready to start thinking about the next holiday, it is very stressful this retirement lark.