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mistletoe along the Saône
Friday, October 28 2016
Off the west bank of the Saône, Tournus, France
We were docked at a little village called Tournus this morning, and immediately after breakfast Gretchen and I borrowed a couple battery-powered bicycles to go on a ride. But we didn't go into Tournus. Instead we followed a little path southward down the west bank of the Saône. Along the way, we passed a machine that was harvesting stalks of corn, processing them, and pouring a river of corn kernels into the bed of a dumptruck. There's always something wrong with these electrical bicycles, and this time it was the power supply on Gretchen's. There seemed to be a flakey connection between the drive system and the battery, and the display on the handlebars kept fluctuating wildly between one and three bars. It mostly worked, though, and even if the power system had utterly failed, the bike could have still been pedalled back to the boat (although these bikes are no fun at all unless there's power). By far the biggest problem on this ride was the cold temperatures (which were down in the mid-40s Fahrenheit). We'd worn layers, so our bodies were comfortable, but our ears, faces, and especially our hands were chilled to the bone. On a normal bike this wouldn't've been much of a problem, but these electric bicycles go fast.
We ended up in the tiny village of Villars, which initially had no signs of life save for the small field of sheep near its center.
After returning our bikes to the boat, we went on a walk through Tournus, ultimately ending up at the abbey. Along the way, we encountered a black man walking a full-on pit bull on a leash. We'd seen a lot of French bulldogs on this trip, but not a single pit bull. Gretchen couldn't help herself and ran up to give the dog some love. The dog was a grey female with a white belly, and she erupted in delight at Gretchen's attention, running about at the limits of her leash, leaping into the air, and onto Gretchen, who gladly accepted the dogs tongue all over her face. The guy probably wasn't used to such a fuss being made over his dog, and he certainly didn't seem to mind.
The abbey was impressively-large structure given the modest scale of the surrounding village. The abbey features beautifully-stout raw brick columns and a vast but mostly unadorned interior in the Romanesque style, with somewhat-flattened rounded arches. Amusingly, there is evidence here and there of foundational settling and other issues that have caused columns and arches to now be visibly out of plumb. As with La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière in Lyon, there is a crypt beneath the main hall, though it's a relatively crude and more obviously dedicated to the dead. Still, it contains beatiful exposed arches in stone. All of that stuff in the crypt had to be done at least as competently as the larger, more-public space it supports. On this particular day, the abbey was filled with piercing notes from the organ, which was in the process of being tuned.
One of many great thing about old stone structures is the graceful way they decay and delaminate. Imagine how a house with vinyl siding ages. It's an ugly, depressing process. But with a stucco-covered stone structure, a patch of missing stucco just adds character and visual interest as the underlying structure is exposed. We marveled at such things as we passed gradually left the site of the abbey and continued on other streets back through the village. Every time I'd see a restaurant claiming to offer pizza I would get excited. But there would be no pizza, chili, or any of the other staples I love offered on the Scenic Sapphire; as Gretchen pointed out, such foods are considered poverty faire, and ours was a luxury cruise.
During lunch, our boat shoved off and headed further up the Saône to its final destination of the voyage, a city called Chalon-sur-Saône. The river seemed very tranquil along the way, full of swans (the most common birds on the water) and occasional groups of cormorants. There were a great many launches for small boats, and the levee (a companion for most of the voyage) featured a continuous line of trees along its ridgetop. Many of these trees, which had already shed their leaves for the winter, included globular patches of leafy vegetation that appeared to be some other plant growing in the tree. I was pretty sure this was mistletoe, a parasitic plant I'd only read about and never seen in nature.
We passed through the last lock of the voyage a little north of Tournus, and by now it seemed routine. I'd been curious about why the width of our boat so precisely matched the width of the locks (which might've only been foot or so wider), but an older guy from Holland explained it all over lunch the other day. It seems that the closer the match of the boat to the lock, the easier it is to get the boat in without bumping against the walls. The water, you see, acts like a lubricant to center the boat in the lock. If the boat is too close to one of the walls, the water pressure forces the boat towards the center. In this way, it's rather like the layer of oil around a piston as it goes up and down in an engine block.
I managed to get a little work done on my laptop just before we docked in Chalon-sur-Saône. In the past we'd always docked in pleasant parts of town, but at this our final destination, we docked in the seedy north end of town at a place that looked like it used to handle freight in happier economic times. There was a big rusting hulk of a crane, but I had my doubts it still worked. The quay was unusually high here, meaning we'd have to come and go from the boat from its topmost deck. This also meant that our balcony window was freakishly even with the top of the quay. So, though I wasn't supposed to do this, I climbed out of the window and was ashore before any of the other Scenic Sapphire passengers.
Though I wasn't particularly excited to explore yet another cute French town, Gretchen and I walked south into Chalon-sur-Saône, went into the Cathédrale Saint-Vincent de Chalon-sur-Saône (somebody was tuning its organ too) and continued northwest. At some point we ducked into a bookstore to see what they are like in France. Gretchen was struck by how uniform and unadorned (white with simple graphics) the paperbacks were. They looked so similar on the shelf that it was as if they were all part of one publisher's book series. Another odd thing about books in French was that the text on their spines read from bottom to top, which is the opposite of the convention for books in English. This means that when a French book is lying flat on a table with its front cover up, the text on its spine is upside-down.
We went into another church called Eglise Saint-Pierre, which had been mentioned somewhere as being in the Rococo style. We went inside and it seemed a bit dingy and neglected; perhaps this was a consequence of the use of so much white paint and stone, which is impossible to keep clean. Not that it was completely run-down, but there was a place near the entranceway that could be framed with the hands in such a way that it looked like it belonged in a youth center or veteran's charity.
Our walk took us across the bridge to a little island in the Saone featuring some sort of old hospital. By this point, though, all I cared about was my full bladder. Fortunately, there was a crumbling remnant of an old stairway just outside the quay down to the Saône that I could get out on and piss in private. By this point I was weary of walking around looking at the same old thing over and over again, and when Gretchen, walking arm-in-arm with me, identified a slight limp in my gait that may or may not have been a consequence of my left foot's tendency to turn in, I kind of snapped (but then caught myself). Part of the reason I was in a somewhat foul mood was a canker sore just inside my mouth on my lower lip's right side. It had been there for the whole trip, and now it just seemed to hurt all the time, especially when I talked.
During dinner tonight, the three couples of our temporary clique all sat together. It was the last dinner of the voyage, and so the hotel manager of the ship made a big show of introducing all of the crew (nearly 50 people, one for nearly every three passengers). Some of the things we were told were probably not true: that we were the best of the season's many groups or that we'd drunk an unusual amount of alcohol. It was all a performance to maximize the tips we would be leaving, and it definitely did leave us feeling warm about the crew. They'd done a really good job in all respects. Our room had been kept fastidiously clean, and we'd rarely spent any time in one of the boat's public places without being asked by one of the crew whether we needed anything.
Still, I was pretty much done with the trip. I was perfectly happy back in the room with my laptop on my lap, drinking occasional alcoholic beverages from the minibar (which, on this voyage, had all been free).
The abbey in Tournus from the outside. Click to enlarge.
The inside of the abbey in Tournus. Click to enlarge.
Our new friends in the dining room tonight. From the left: Andrew, Michelle, Nathan, and Christina. Click to enlarge.
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