A final foray into France

This is likely to be my last blog post before Christmas, and maybe even for this year, although I'll try and do a New Year's post as well.

December being a quiet month when mostly I feel like simply hibernating, you might be surprised to hear that we made another quick foray into our newly favourite part of France, the Haute Marne. Of course it helps to have a daughter with a house there, but we are quite in love with the region. It is beautifully spacious, gloriously scenic (even in horrid weather, which was the unexpected part) and sparsely populated. In summer, it is heavenly; in winter, nowhere is, but the Haute Marne comes close.

Our jaunt took us first to the beautiful, ancient town of Joinville, which attracts me immensely with its narrow, winding streets that seem to breathe history. We stopped there for lunch and wandered the streets absorbing its old-world atmosphere.  Many of the houses have cellars and we saw one with its doors open, which I could have instantly occupied. What a fine space it was, complete with water heater, a tiled floor and bicycles. Koos sneaked in and took a photo. It looked perfect for conversion into a small apartment.

What if all cellars were like this?

The upper town is the original part of the old settlement and it wraps itself around a hill topped by the ruins of a castle. It's crumbly, romantic and wonderful. I love it. Koos took all the photos below except for the church steeple. I was too busy  drifting about absorbing the historical romance of the environs.

Later, we followed the Marne valley to the village of Gudmont Villiers-sur Marne where Koos indulged his inner child and enjoyed watching the train at the level crossing. Again, we walked through the village, delighting in the sturdy stone houses with their uniform mellow hue. Christmas is clearly a big thing in the area, as every village sported decorations attached to fences, traffic bollards, gates and houses. Christmas trees were dotted around the villages adorned with lights and colour, and it looked very festive. In the Netherlands, we also have a lot of street decorations, but they tend to be more focused on prolific lights and commercially produced figures of reindeer and snowmen. In France, most of the adornments looked home-made, which gave them great charm.

We spent two nights in the area before heading back home again. In theory, we could have stayed longer, but, contrary to what the forecast predicted, the weather was quite miserable and the days were too short to do anything much in the evenings, so we drove back home on Tuesday. As you can see from the photo below, Zoe was pleased to be queen of her castle again.

My Cockney spaniel: The pearly queen

In our Dutch village, we are now leading up to Christmas when we'll be having family down for the day at the crumbly cottage. The boats will have to fend for themselves for a few days as Vereeniging is too small for entertaining and the Hennie H is even smaller and too cold, but hopefully, with weather permitting, we'll be back on board before too long.

Happy Christmas one and all!!

So that's it for this time allemaal. Wishing you all a very happy and lovely Christmas, and I look forward to catching up with you as the New Year approaches.