Susan's Blog

Why is it that there is never the time to sit and write? Or am I just not making the time? Well, we have been busy since the end of the season in 2011 with many things so I’m going to use that as my excuse for not getting to this sooner…..

So a reasonable start should be Happy New Year to all who read this! And we hope that you all had a great holiday time. Ours was spent sorting out our new home here in the US — we moved from New York to Florida, had loads of visitors, and are just now starting to get to know our new surroundings. All just in time to get ready for the new season on board Meanderer and the beautiful canals of France. We are anticipating a great season again this year.

Our fantastic chef and his wonderful wife are coming back. Sylvain will continue to amaze our guests with his fantastic light touch to some traditional French cuisine and we’ll see if we can find even more interesting wines to have on board in addition to those we already enjoy. That’s always fun for me! Interesting how pretty much all French people know and understand wines and cheese like no-one else. You can have heated discussions about cheese vendors and whether they understand the cheeses that they sell or not!!! Quite amusing really! And of course everyone knows all the vendors in the region…….Something about village life and rural surroundings. Topics are always food, wine and the weather!
Kate, Sylvain’s wife, will continue to be the best hostess on the canals of France!!!! Her quiet wit and amazing attention to detail make life on board Meanderer an exceptional experience. We are so lucky to have her. We always get comments that she is never seen doing all the things that make Meanderer so special — she magically moves around the boat taking care of everyone.

So, as a precursor to the new season, which will begin before we know it, I thought I’d go through some of the hundreds of photos that I take and share some of them with you. No particular theme other than moments on the canal and places we visit………
(Click on the photos to enlarge for better viewing)
We see so many spectacular sunsets so here are a few for you to enjoy

I always talk about hidden gems when we have guests on board. Our region is “the road less travelled” which is wonderful because most of the time we have the place to ourselves when we go visiting. We are not fighting the crowds. One day I was walking in Montargis and took a different street than I typically do and 50 yards from the magnificent church (which we visit with our guests all the time) I came across an oddity! An old balcony stuck on the side of a building. It’s quite beautiful with gorgeous wood carvings and exquisite details. Where did it come from? I went to the tourist office to ask….. Apparently it came from a village not too far away and the building was about to be torn down. So the town of Montargis decided to rescue the balcony. It dates from the 16C I’m told but other than that there doesn’t seem to be much known about it!

I’m often asked — “don’t you get bored cruising the same route all the time?” “NO!!!” is always my emphatic answer. The countryside is so beautiful and changing all the time. The fields change, the canal changes, the trees and plants change…..

When I went back this winter there had been work going on in the canals. There is a long stretch that we cruise and the canal breached!!!! Work is going on as I write and it all should be prepared ready for the start of the season but it’s interesting viewing. First of all, there’s the empty canal!! It really isn’t very deep so when I tell you that if we were to breach our hull you’d never know it — it’s true! We’d simply sit on the bottom and watch the water flow past us!!! Look at the photos below though — hopefully you can see the river of mud that fell on the downside of the bank — and at the end — a stand of snowdrops peeking through early — a surprise in the mess.

As the seasons change so do our views of course. The end of the season is Fall and we can get some frosty, misty mornings. It can be a challenge for George to pilot when it’s like that but it can make for some wonderful sights….

And then there’s winter…..and that’s why we don’t cruise in winter!!! Still beautiful though.

Spiders!!! They are the bane of my life on the boat, spinning their webs where they are not welcome! But, oh so beautiful when they are draped on grasses, shrubs, and lock gates, dripping with crystals of dew…

I hope I didn’t bombard you with too many photos….. the next blog will be when we’re back in France and prepping for the season.
Until then……

There’s no doubt that wines are a big part of the experience in France. The harvest happened about a month early this year thanks to the dry and hot spring. Early word is that it will be a good quality harvest (at least in Sancerre where we do our main visits).
(Click on the photos to [...]

It’s July already and we are cruising of course. All my good intentions of writing a blog early somehow vanished…. Hopefully you agree with “better late than never”.
Spring here has been remarkable. We have had the warmest and driest since we began our adventure here. We’ve been able to completely repaint Meanderer from top to [...]

It’s hard to say which, of all the visits that we offer, is my favorite but I think that the gorgeous Château of La Bussière ranks right up there. I’m not sure whether it is the château itself or the incredible potager (fruit and vegetable garden) which dates from the 18th century. The château was [...]

When we finish a season there is always time to reflect on how it went, how we did and so on. This time I started to wonder about how often we do certain things. So……………………..here are some fun facts and figures for you.

This year we cruised for a total of 16 weeks. We cleared about [...]

Time, I thought, to write a blog in a little more depth about one of our treasures here in the region — the Arboretum National Des Barres. Located in Nogent-Sur-Vernisson it is one of the listed places in France to visit. It’s an amazing place. Over 2,500 species of trees with some hundreds of years [...]

So I decided that I might as well make some use of the cache of UBI’s that apparently I have stored in my brain! What’s a UBI? — Useless Bit of Information. Trivia, I suppose, but most likely nothing that would ever come in useful in normal daily life!! George is always amused by the [...]

So we set off for our first week of cruising under a cloud…….yes, the cloud of volcanic ash that paralyzed most of Europe for a while! We were aware of it but were not really paying attention to the news properly since we were working long days to get the boat ready. Chaos everywhere apparently, [...]

The new season is almost upon us. We arrived back from the US to be greeted with almost balmy weather… How nice. Today as I write it is raining and hailing!! Oh well. That too shall pass and we will be able to get everything done so Meanderer looks pretty as she always does. She [...]

The new season will be here before we know it and we all complain that time rushes by relentlessly. Sometimes it’s good to reflect on things past and last season was so much fun for us that I thought I should share some of our high points from 2009.
Certainly it was an easier season for [...]