Advertisement
Published: December 17th 2016
Edit Blog Post
We are now tucked up for Xmas in Castelnaudary against the quay alongside a busy road. We have had to put up one way window film and net curtains to stop the nosy people peering into the boat!
Castelnaudary is a great little town with good shopping, bars and restaurants. Within 2 minutes walk we have excellent medical facilities which we have been utilising quite a bit as we seem to be falling apart as winter rolls on. The weather has been superb with mostly sunny days although the wind down here does seem to blow straight out of the Arctic.
There is a fairly active social life here this winter with a good mix of live-aboards and lots of planned events such as pub nights quiz nights, bake- offs, wine tasting etc. We have just had a night when most of the boats turned on their Xmas lights all at once and then had a party in the local wine bar. Great fun but the dancing was a mistake with all our injuries. Xmas lunch is planned with about 16 of us contributing something.
Our trip along the Canal du Midi was absolutely delightful and it lived
up to our memories of it from the 1990’s. The first part was quite sad as most of the beautiful plane trees were either badly diseased with no leaves or had been chopped down. Although there is a replanting scheme under way it will be many years before they start to offer the shade and delight of the missing ones. Further along the canal the trees were in abundance and we made the most of the shade they offered as all through September and October it was very sunny and hot although we did have a few very cold days when we dug out the beanies and winter woollies.
We managed to catch up with our Aussie friends John and Ros from Sydney, whom we had met during our circumnavigation. We have remained friends over the years, but not seen them for at least 5 years. They were having a retirement holiday in France and a Rhine Cruise. It was so good to see them and felt like we had only just seen each other the day before.
We made it to the end of the Canal du Midi, as far as Toulouse, and then turned around and
headed back, returning to Castelnaudary towards the end of October. We spent most nights tied up along the canal bank, just hammered in a few stakes and hoped the charter boats would not go so fast that they would pull them out. We used our little petrol generator a lot especially when the inverter that runs the freezer packed up.
Up to Castelnaudary we spent a lot of time in locks with charter boats, most were well behaved but there were a few idiots. The only boat that hit us hard in a lock though was a private boat, but no damage done. On one occasion we remarked to a group of American charterers how well they were handling their boat, we didn’t know at the time but they were all either pilots or captains of very large tankers and container ships so they laughed at our comments and as we were together for quite a while became friends. One boat with a load of British guys on became our best friends when we told them how to buy wine in a restaurant by the pichet rather than bottle, they were very drunk all the times we saw them
but they were careful in the locks once we showed them how to do it. There were lots of Aussies and Kiwis in charter boats, all flying very large flags, some with blow-up kangaroos steering but always friendly and having a good time. There were lots of “Aussie Aussie Aussies” and “Go the All Blacks”, “Go the Wallabies”!
We spent some time in Carcassonne which is a great town, after Carcassonne the amount of charter boats decreased rapidly and at times we were the only boat in the locks, especially between Castelnaudary and Toulouse.
Our plans to get down to Portugal and Spain have been delayed, and have written off going back to Swara this winter. Peter is booked into hospital for surgery to repair a hernia in early January and Marg is booked into see a hand surgeon in mid January. Marg has been going around with a broken bone in her wrist since she fell 18 months ago; only an MRI revealed it and some other damage that will probably need surgery. We are trying to convert all our blogs into a book, and this is quite time consuming as we basically have to rewrite it
all and sort and correct photos for it so winter is passing quickly.
Yeti is two on the 19
th December it is incredible how fast the time has flown since we saw him before he opened his eyes, he loves it in Castelnaudary and has lots of doggy friends from other boats and the town.
We hope you all have a very Merry Xmas and a great New Year and all the best of everything for 2017.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.345s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 10; qc: 49; dbt: 0.054s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Phillip King
non-member comment
Hi Guys
Dog looks positively suave! Thanks for the blog and photos , have a great Xmas and new year and we look forward to hearing of more of your travels. Good luck with the medicals . We would love to spend some time on the canals , what are your long term plans for Vintage Cru? Talk soon, Phil and Sylvie