Pictures of Haute-Marne, France

As you may have guessed from the title, we are in France at the CCMkII (Crumbly Cottage Mark II, the CCMkI being in the Netherlands, for anyone not familiar with my chaotic life). In principle, life at CCII is much the same as it is at home. It's just that we have no boats here, (much to my regret) which should mean I have less to do, but somehow it doesn't work that way. 

What is a blessing is that we have internet, so I can still keep up with work; we also have plenty of DIY jobs as the house is, well, yes, crumbly, and what we do has to be done in the short spells we are here. But that's okay. There's no goal and we're not aiming to be in the Home and Garden magazines for the best restoration job. There's just Koos and me, two old crumblies ourselves, so we do what we can and enjoy being in France and among French people. 

What can I say about our sojourn here this time? Well, the autumn has been stunning until the last two days. Even this last Friday, it was 25ºC in the afternoon. The nights have been chilly, though, but in general it has been so like a South African Winter I've loved every minute of it. The photos below are a collection of snapshots I've taken of our environs in the area and also of that little gem of a town, Joinville, of which I have become so fond.

Vouécourt, where we had coffee and ice cream after DIY 
shopping in Chaumont

Ah, okay, excuse the dog spam. A photo of Zoe had to creep in somewhere!

Zoe with Koos 

Back to business, the next few photos were taken at Luzy-sur-Marne, a delightful village just south of Chaumont. I regret not taking photos in the village itself, but I was a bit smitten with its river frontage.

The footbridge or passerelle over the canal; a bit rusty
but a fine structure

The road bridge over the same canal. This one lifts.

And then to Joinville. These photos are some I took of a walk around town I did with Zoe one morning when I was there. I discovered some gorgeous little alleys and tiny streets that could be drawn straight from a medieval novel. The electricity cables and the cars give it away, of course, but I love the fact the cables are on the outside of the houses and in some cases cross the streets overhead. We would never see anything so old-fashioned in the Netherlands, a land where everything can be buried in sand.

Earlier that same day, I'd climbed to the top of the hill against which Joinville is built. It's the site of the old castle, which crowned the hilltop from the 11th to the 17th century when it was (and I'm scandalised by this) sold to a stonemason who gradually dismantled and sold off the stone. I know the view from the top is amazing, but not the morning I scaled its exceptionally steep slopes. The next two photos show all that could be seen from the former chateau's position; the clouds hung low over the town and everything was completely obscured. 

Up in the clouds with just a few rays of sunshine
penetrating the gloom

Looking straight out from the top of the 'Chateau en haut'

Then, the image below is what I saw when I climbed down into town again; the skies were clear and it was a glorious day. No sign of the foge that had been enveloping me just minutes before.

Back at the CC again, we had a busy day when our delivery of winter fuel arrived for the wood-burning stove. At home in the Netherlands, we can order quantities of wood from one to several cubic metres, but here, the supplier told Koos the minimum was five cubic metres. This is what it looked like in the lane next to the CC where he tipped it out. In fact, this doesn't really give the full impression because the heap went back quite some way. Koos and I looked at each other in shock. 

 

The lane is a public road and although not used very often we knew we couldn't leave the wood there. We spent the next two hours (or maybe three?) re-locating it over the wall into the lean-to we'd spent even more hours clearing of rubbish last year. 

This is what it looked like when we'd finished. Not too bad for a morning's work by two old crumblies :)

Since then, Koos has nobly been rearranging it and stacking it neatly in the French style. I must say his patience puts me to shame. I have conveniently found other jobs to do which, naturally, couldn't wait.

And what of the canal? It's still almost empty and the VNF are still working on the locks near us. There are boats at the halte nautique in Froncles that haven't been able to move this summer and will probably be stuck there until next year. And it's not just our stretch. The photo below is of the canal at Luzy-sur-Marne which is roughly fifty kilometres from us. Perhaps it will be full again one day. We can but hope! The weather has turned today, so I doubt if anyone is fretting to be on board except me. 

Have a good week allemaal, and if you want a giggle, take a look at this old post of mine. I discovered it today and was weeping with laughter over the student howlers my colleagues and I collated. If the autumn chills are getting to you, their well-meant errors are guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
 

Five days four countries

If you don't live in the country of your birth, and where all your family live, you tend to miss out on important events, such as weddings and other landmark occasions. In 2022, I missed the first of my sister's daughters' weddings due to Covid restrictions; in 2024, another of her daughters got married, but we also missed that for other reasons. So when the date for last of the three girls' weddings was announced as Friday 2 October, 2026, I knew I had to go, as did Jodie, my own daughter 1.

In our planning, several months in advance, we decided we would drive over, originally intending to stay the night near the venue and to take our time driving back. A lovely break, we decided. No rush, of course!

That all changed when Jodie was offered an opportunity to exhibit her art at a special event in the Netherlands on Saturday, the 3rd. The leisurely aspect of the journey suddenly vanished and we had a deadline to meet. We had to be back home by 2 o'clock on Saturday afternoon to give Jodie time to be ready for her slot at the exhibition. There was also the issue of collecting her dog, Lucy who was spending the night with daughter 2. Mo was going to be leaving for France the next day, so postponing the collection was not an option.

The drive to the wedding went very smoothly. We left home at 2.30 in the morning so as to arrive at Calais in time to check in and board the 6.15 Shuttle train. The trip from Folkestone to the West Country also went well and we took a route I well remember from my youth, the A303 from Basingstoke on, which goes right past Stonehenge. 

Well, that was such a thrill. I haven't seen our most famous pile of old rocks since I was in my early twenties and there they were. I can hardly believe I managed to snatch a photo through the car window and not have any people in the frame.

The rest of the journey was also glorious, the English countryside at its lovely best in the sunshine, and all the more beautiful the further west we went.

We reached the wedding venue an hour before time, which gave us the chance to change into our fancy finery. I almost blew it by tumbling down a step in the cottage where we were changing as I fumbled to find a light switch, but luckily no harm was done and I was rescued by one of my nieces and her friends;  sometimes, being a senior auntie has its benefits! 😉

The wedding itself was delightful. The service was conducted outside and was both informal and perfect, even when my niece admitted she'd lost her vow and had to adlib. It was just so her and she was so happy as she skipped down the aisle; her joy was infectious.

After the service, we had the chance to catch up with my family at the reception. Being with my eldest brother, his wife and their son and daughter was wonderful as I haven't seen them in years, and, of course, spending time with my sister and hers is always special. I don't see my family all too often so I value the occasions I can be with them immensely.

Jodie and I left as the party was still in full swing at around 9.30 that night, hoping to have an easy drive to Newbury where we'd booked a motorway services hotel room for the night. But this was when life became a tad more interesting than we'd bargained for. 

Heading into Bristol, we'd planned to take the M5 and then the M4 motorways heading east. The first glitch was when, without warning, the M5 eastern on-ramp was closed, so we had to go west to the next junction before we could go east again. Then, a section of the M4 was closed and we were sent on a magical mystery adventure through country lanes before we could get back onto the motorway again. By this time, poor Jodie (who did all the driving) was mentally clenching her teeth (or maybe physically too), especially as we knew we had to be at the hotel before midnight. Luckily, we made it and all was well as we eventually fell into bed.

We were back on the road again at 6.30 the next morning and had an easy drive through to Folkestone. But then life went pear-shaped again. Remember that art exhibition and the deadline? Well, all the tunnel trains were delayed and we were an hour late leaving. The trouble was there was virtually no information about what had caused the delays and how long they would be. What made it worse was that I was desperate to go to the loo but dithering as to whether I should make a run for it and risk missing the starting gun. In the end, I did do the dash (the alternative would not have been pleasant) and it was fine, but the result of the delay was that we were only back home in the Netherlands again after 3pm. 

I'd already offered to go and fetch Jodie's pooch, so I left her to prepare for her show, gathered up Zoe and jumped in my car to drive north for a rendez-vous to meet Mo with Lucy dog. Meeting accomplished, it all worked out and I was back home again early evening. However, on Tuesday morning, we were off again as Koos and I left home to drive down to France for a spell at the Crumbly Cottage Mk2.

Now, having covered four countries in such a short time, I am in recovery position, i.e. taking it easy, wondering what I should be doing and meandering around vaguely with a feather duster to remove all the cobwebs that have accumulated since August – while I figure out what's important and what can wait. The weather has changed from sunny and chilly to grey and cold, but that's alright as we have a delivery of firewood tomorrow. We can finally start accepting we are nearly halfway through October, and summer is really over; maybe it's time for the woollies to come out at last.

As for the canal we were hoping would be open for faring by now, it is almost completely empty. Not water shortages – no, they have drained it for repairs. Why waterways staff couldn't have done those in the summer months when the canals were closed for lack of rain, I don't know. I suppose they were on holiday then. This is France, after all. But still, the scenery is beautiful, isn't it? 

Have a wonderful weekend allemaal and I'll fill you in on the latest from the Haute-Marne soon. And for anyone who's wondering, we are a very long way from any riots and unrest. 

Transport with a difference

It's already nearly the end of September and this is only my second post this month. Mea culpa! Far from lacking the desire to write it, life has just had other priorities due to the fact it has been lovely weather for much of the month. With cooler nights and warm days (not always sunny, but very pleasant), the joy of being outside has been even greater when compared to August's crippling heat. As a result, that's where I've been as much of the time as possible.

In my last post, I wrote about how daughter #1 and I painted the hull of Vereeniging using our two rowing boats, Bluey and Little Grey. Since then, we've done other jobs on the barge, but I also had a lovely day with daughter #2 when she and her partner came down to go out for a bike ride with the dogs.

What prompted this initially was her acquisition of a dog trailer for her spaniel Mack, which meant she and Steven could go exploring by bike with Mack in the trailer. They've had some grand adventures and so much fun I was inspired to buy one for Zoe and see if we could do the same. After a search on our version of ebay, I found a suitable one for my little pooch, and the test run was promising. I can't say yet that she loves it, but she was good as gold when we tried it out and she definitely enjoyed the afternoon excursion we did with the family.

Ready for our test run. She was a very good girl.

So we decided on an excursion further afield than just around the village. Below are some photos of our 'grand day out' with Mo, Steven and Mack.

Mack is a bigger boy than Zoe so his carriage was
a couple of sizes larger

And here we are, out on an adventure. See Zoe's little face 
watching Mo out the back of her carriage.

Once we were off the main road, the pups had their freedom

That little face just slays me. :)

Since then, I've taken her over to Vereeniging in her trailer and I'll try and do more trips to get her used to it. Given that she's a lazy little tyke and finds street walks dull, I think it might come in very handy just to get her to the woods and the nature reserve where she enjoys running free. 

Anyway, after that adventure, it was back to work on the boats, but this time on our Hennie H whose roof badly needed attention. It took me four days to sand and paint it but I finally finished, barring the edges, which I'll have to do this week. She's not looking too bad for a shabby old lady, is she? I wish I could say the same for myself (says she studying her battered hands and fingernails).

The next job is going to be painting the hull, which also needs some TLC. For that, I needed our Little Grey which happened to be lying next to Vereeniging with Bluey in the historic harbour. The boats' two harbours are separated by around 750 metres of parkland and a huge road bridge. Of course, it would have been nice to row it around the island but the rules of the Gent-Terneuzen canal mean that rowing boats aren't permitted, so the only other way to move Little Grey was overland. 

Since he has rollers for that purpose, I decided to walk him from one harbour to the other and thanks to daughter #1, this proved to be as easily done as said. We received a few odd looks from passers by for using this novel method of transporting a boat but it really was fun in the sun.

#Daughter 1, Jodie, pulling Grey as well as leading her Lucy

And I did my bit too!

Little Grey is now 'parked' next to Hennie H ready for action, which I hope to be starting this week. Fingers crossed that the weather remains kind.

And now for a photo of my ridiculous dog for Rebecca Hislop. I honestly don't know what Zoe thinks she is sometimes but this position is quite a common one for her to adopt. She is definitely very sweet but also totally bonkers.

Have a lovely week allemaal and I'll try and catch up soon with the rest of the news from our corner of the flatlands.

 

Blacking with Bluey

It's two weeks since I last posted here and I'm not quite sure why I haven't. It's been busy, of course, but that's normal. The education year has started again and I've been making some extra efforts to find work, something which is in slightly short supply at the moment for me as a freelancer, so I've been writing emails and updating my CV and generally putting the word out for my availability. Doing all that has definitely taken up some time.

People often ask me when I intend to retire fully and the honest answer is that I don't know. For one thing, I enjoy what I do very much. I love the contact I have with students and researchers as I find it stimulating to learn about their studies, their subjects and their opinions. The discussions are lively and it does me good to be challenged by these younger, eager minds. I might not agree with them; I sometimes don't, but being part of the debate stops me from stagnating and vegetating. That has to be a plus, doesn't it?

The other aspect is financial. Without going into detail, I came to the Netherlands too late to receive a full pension and because of the time I've been away from the UK, I am not entitled to any money from when I worked there. As for South Africa, there was (maybe still is) no reciprocal pension arrangement with Europe, and anyway, I've been away from there too long as well. Had I been financially savvy, I'd have organised myself much earlier, but I wasn't, so I just have to live with the situation. Working fills the gap and so I'll carry on teaching as long as I keep on enjoying it. After that? Well, we'll see.

So what about writing more, you might ask. It's a good question. I love writing, but it's my hobby and I've never wanted to make it my job. Okay, I worked in marketing and communications for many years, but then I was writing to order for a company. I loved that too, but it's very different from writing books and trying to market them yourself. I've never wanted my books to be 'products' and I'm hopeless at self promotion, so that wouldn't work for me. Besides, to write professionally would mean spending hours at my computer and I'm far too fidgety for that. Everyone in my sphere knows I can't sit still for more than fifteen minutes. That aside, I have a barge (make that two) to look after, which brings me to the title of this blog...see, you knew I'd get there eventually, didn't you?

A few blogs ago, I mentioned that the weather had been very harsh on Vereeniging's hull this past year. She was out of the water for three weeks in 2025 and looked beautiful when we brought her back to the harbour at Sas van Gent. However, the hard winds, storms and extreme heat of this summer reduced the shiny top coat on the hull to a cracked and flaking mess. It was horribly disappointing.

So I had an idea that I cooked up with daughter #1. If we bought another little rowing boat, we could both repaint the hull down to the waterline within a day. Enter Blue (or Bluey as he is now called), the little boat I wrote about in my last post. A couple of days after Bluey's arrival, we descended on Vereeniging with a five-litre pot of hull paint, pulled both Bluey and Grey (the little boat we already had) into the water and took a side each. We had already scraped and sanded all the flaking paint off, so now it was a matter of very carefully rolling new hull paint on to avoid any drips into the water. 

I can report that Bluey is not quite as spotless as he was on arrival and Grey is also well spattered with black, but we did it and Vereeniging has a bit more protection now against the winter furies. She may not be shiny, but at least her hull is painted again. Daughter #1 and I, however, were splattered in black and exhausted at the end of the day. It took us both some time to recover. The muscles needed to keep the boats in place while painting in a harbour with busy water were worth a fortune in workouts.

As you can see, then, this is one reason why I could not sit and write fulltime for a living. The other reason is in the photos below. Well, not really, but Zoe needs walks despite her own conviction that she doesn't. A lazier and more reluctant dog I have yet to meet. She much prefers to snooze in this corner of the sofa. 😄

Tomorrow and every day that the weather allows and work permits this month, we'll be doing more paintwork on both Vereeniging and Hennie H, but for now, I'll wish you all a great week, allemaal and hope to have more updates on life here in the flatlands soon.

An unexpected excursion

Last Saturday,  daughter 1 and I went on an unexpected excursion and found this glorious, almost secret beach.

The Grevelingenmeer

But before I get to that, there was a small matter of collecting an addition to our fleet. Yes, really, but before I hear all the gasps and 'are you mad?'s, let me show you what it is:

Meet 'Blue' our new maintenance dinghy. I know. We have one already, but it's so much handier if we have two so that we can work independently at different places on Vereeniging's hull. Add to that, we also have a Hennie Ha, so now we can, in theory, work on both boats simultaneously if need be! We found this little gem on our Dutch version of ebay and it's immaculate. I'm almost reluctant to get it dirty it's in such good condition, but we bought it for a bargain price and we are delighted with it. 

Anyway, to collect it involved a 110 km drive north to the town of Hellevoetsluis (pronounced Hellefootslouse) to the south west of Rotterdam. Saturday started off beautifully and the sun shone as Daughter 1 and I, together with  pups, Lucy and Zoe, on the back seat, sped along the western edge of Zeeland, over the amazing Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, part of the famous Delta works and across the islands to our destination. For Jodie, it was a brand new route as she'd never been that way before and I think she was quite captivated by the wild coastal duneland with its covering off rough golden grass and tempting hiking possibilities.

Having mounted 'Blue' on the roof, we set off back with the aim of finding a good spot to walk the dogs. We'd originally thought we might go to the beach, but with the weather being so fine, a change of plan looked more appealing and we turned off at signs to the Grevelingenmeer, one of the many wide bodies of water that weave between the islands and peninsulars on this unique part of the country. 

My daughter, being a keen walker, has an app on her phone with all the trails available wherever she goes, and she could see how we could have a lovely walk from where we parked through the nature reserve to the waterside. The photos below give an idea of what it was like.

Part of the walk, which was all like this with virtually no-one
else to disturb us. The dogs had a wonderful time.

And then we arrived at this beach. Who needs the sea when
you can have this? says Zoe.

Time to dispense with shoes and socks and go for a paddle.

And time for a cheeky pooch to pinch her mum's socks :)

Zoe had a lovely time rolling in the sand...yes...it did get
everywhere!

But with a face like this, is anyone going to mind?

On the way back to the car, we saw this old WWII bunker. Apparently this area has fifteen of them, which visitors can follow as a walk of a short, but quite challenging 1.5 km. Definitely something I would like to do in the coming months. It would be so interesting to learn about the bunkers' history and what part they played in the war. I understand that underground hikes are also possible but not being a fan of tunnels, I'm not sure I'd like to do that. We also saw a poster advertising a guided night walk to observe the local bats. Unfortunately, it was on the same day as our visit, so too difficult to arrange, but I'd love to join that in the future if they repeat it.

So that's it for this month, allemaal. September begins tomorrow and with it the hints of autumn, but I hope we'll have at least some of those golden days that characterise this time of year. We need a decent bridge between the inferno of these last months and the cold days of winter, don't we?