Off We Go, June 16

The locks on the Canal de Bourgogne are staffed and open at 9 am, close for lunch from 12-1 and then close again for the night at 7 pm.  We didn’t want to push ourselves doing too many locks on our inaugural trip so we figured we’d take two days to travel to Dijon.  The first lock on Tuesday was about 20 minutes from the boatyard basin so we pushed off at 8:45.  Up we went.  It didn’t take too long to get back into the locking mode and we were alone traveling up so all went surprisingly well.  Oldtimer is more than twice as heavy and about 2 feet wider than Odysseus, kind of the difference between and truck and an old volkswagon, so it requires much more care when entering locks. Keeping it slow, we suffered very few bumps.  Two locks after the lunch break we were snug along the bank at Longecourt. We’d done 7 locks in all and it was only 1:45. We walked into town to get our daily bread, passing the chateau in town.  Reservations are required for a tour so we just admired it from the outside.

After our brief stroll about town it was back to the boat for a little r and r after our stressful day.  But first, our first bankside picture - 

It still says Musigny on the side of the boat because we haven’t gotten our official French registration with the name change back to Oldtimer yet.

And the sun set on our first day away from the dock.