Rangali Adventures: Chateau Thierry to Trilport

Monday 12^th August and Tues 13^th August

We stayed another night as our good friends Marion and Phil came to see us, they were only staying about 50 minutes drive from us. We had a great time with them, and we were very sorry to see them go on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday morning we set off earlyish to try and travel about 50km we ended up doing 76km! Again, not on purpose! We saw a lovely mooring at Nanteuil-sur-Marne PK 74 but this was at 12 noon-ish and we felt it was too early to stop seeing as we are trying to get to Paris as soon as possible. We ended up at PK 127 Trilport when we finally found a place to moor up. Our guide gives mooring places but often its only room for 1-2 boats or the mooring doesn’t actually exist! Saying that, The Marne is a truly beautiful river, we have seen so many Kingfishers today, the scenery is beautiful and the river a delight.

I had an interesting experience in one of the locks today. The locks have all being going down, all very easy, relaxing. I was at the bow, rope on bollard. As the gates slowly closed on the lock, and the lock very slowly prepared to empty, I watched a fluffy bee walk over to my rope and the bollard it was wrapped around. The bee managed to get over that obstacle and then duly walked to edge of lock and suddenly fell about into the lock, it was struggling to stay afloat. I looked away thinking that was that, end of the bee. Something caught my eye, I saw the bee climbing back up the vertical stone lock wall, it got to the slippery metal section that topped the lock wall it lost its grip and fell again into the water. I watched it struggling again in the water, which now was emptying out of the lock, so the bee, still struggling, disappeared to one of the sluices. I was thinking it looked quite sad as I didn’t think it will survive……my rope suddenly went tight……I realised I’d not been watching my rope and it had jammed, I couldn’t free it, so I shouted to Kev, he got one of our knives we keep for this type of emergency and cut the rope. Ping it went and we were free…….I am now keeping my eye on the ball in each lock, watching the rope and also making sure we keep our knives, one at the bow and one on the stern…ours we were in the drawer in the wheelhouse. We had got into holiday mode and forgot the importance of keeping them nearer to hand which we had been doing.

Wednesday 14^th

We will up date later but we have about 56km to get to Paris, we thought we’d see if we could get there today, we left early but we are now stuck behind a commercial barge on a canalized section. We were travelling about 5.2kts on the River, we are now doing 2.5kts, just about on tick over. So I wil let you know if we make ot today or if its more

Chateau Thierry is a fortified town
Being August most of the town was shut-all on their holidays

pretty good photo as Kev set the camera on automatic and balanced it on a wall,
he couldn't even see if it had us in the frame, bit of cropping and its a perfect photo!