Lockless

Today we did our our final lock until the Fonserannes Locks which we should get to on Monday. It was nice to cruise down the canal enjoying the scenery and not have to work around the lock keepers hours. Yesterday we reached a lock at 11.30 and there were some boats coming up the lock we had to wait until they are through. The lock keepers close the locks for lunch from 12 to 1 BUT can close them up to 15 mins early. So of course this happened to us, we just tied up and made lunch, and hung around until 1pm when they reopened. It can be a pain when there’s nothing much to do near the lock, I imagine it would be even harder to plan around this in summer when there’s loads of boats waiting. The locks take 3 boats at a time and sometimes are 2 or 3 locks joined so it takes a while to come through, then of course if there’s boats coming the other way you have to wait for them to come through as they fill the locks back up again. 

We were in the locks with some German men on another Le Boat when Leisa said "there’s something wrong with their boat, it’s on a lean"  the lock keeper stopped the water lowering and went racing around shouting at them. They’d run one side of the boat up on to the edge (where you walk) of the lock and the guy on ropes was oblivious to it. The locks empty around 3 meters of water so it could have been nasty. The lock keeper was pointing at the guy and pointing at his eyes - in other words look at what you are doing!! We did several locks with this boat and it was a comedy of errors. The same guy jumped off the boat with the ropes and fell over onto the bank, he also jumped without allowing enough rope and almost hung himself, his rope was so knotted he couldn’t pull it around the bollard without help. Honestly it was hard to watch, we were glad to get some space between us. 

So today was enjoyable, we stopped at Argens-Minervois and had a  lunch at a canalside restaurant called La Guinguette which was like an outdoor Mexican cantina with a huge open fire for meat and decorated with festoon lighting, the staff spoke no English but we managed. I’d love to be able to visit there at night. We were so relaxed we could have stayed all day.  The scenery again was spectacular, poppy fields, vineyards, chateaus and even a few donkeys. 

We stopped at a lovely little town called Paraza, it was like a ghost town, all the shutters closed so we wandered up to the large chateau for some wine tasting. We enjoyed the walk but not so much the wine. 

There was a little house that had a shop in so we had a little sticky beak and oh my lord we’ve not seen anything like it. It was 2 levels of vintage clothing that the owners bring in from Paris. The shop is called Showroom 16 Paraza if you want to google and have a look. We didn’t buy anything but people were there from nearby villages shopping up a storm.  

We are now at Le Somail which is so pretty. We went for bike ride around the town (as it’s nice and flat), we were looking for the supermarket and some local boys who didn’t speak English tried to give us instructions, eventually we found it and picked up some supplies, as we were riding back through the village the boys saw our shopping bags and cheered 😂. We had a nice dinner beside the canal watching the world go by.  It’s so lovely in this part of the world.