This week we moved past the one month marker.
We’ve been paddling our canoe now for 36 days and not one of them has been the same.
The week began with two daunting days.
While previously 12 locks passed had been worthy of a tweet, we found ourselves facing 40 in the short section of canal that lay ahead.
Those couple of days were some of the most physically testing we’ve had yet as we bobbed from lock to lock with more hours spent lifting and walking than paddling our canoe.
While exhausting work, the way we managed the locks reflected our growth in confidence when it comes to overcoming big obstacles.
It’s not unusual to approach a lock where the operator leans over the bridge, shaking his head at you before you’ve even spoken.
They tell us we can’t enter and we tell them we’ll go round. They tell us there’s a fence and we tell them we’ll go round that.
They tell us the sides are steep and we tell them we’ve seen steeper.
It seems it’s not until we have wedged our toes in the smallest crack, passed our heavy gear up the concrete slope, lifted the canoe and see-sawed it on the high ridge of the river bank; and done it all over again on the other side, before the lock-keeper considers we’re more than two kids out for a daily paddle.
The bigger the obstacle, the bigger the challenge and, since we’re not going to turn back, we always know it can be overcome. Somehow.
By midweek we paddled out onto the River Saône on a blustery day and waves beat the side of the canoe.
Pleased to be off the canal for a while, it reminded us that being back on the upstream would be no walk in the park.
But in the morning came perfect conditions, cool and calm.
The Saône, which we thought would take us the rest of the week, was a river so slow that lily pads grew along the edges and in the ideal conditions we covered mile after mile of unbroken river with no real need to stop.
The sad truth, of course, is the better the water, the quicker it’s covered and just two days later we were at the entrance to our next long waterway, the Rhone-Rhine Canal.
We’d doubled the distance we expected and now sit a short way along the 150 mile canal which takes us to the German border.
Physically it was a varied week.
We went from constantly hauling and hiking to non-stop paddling and we finish just as tired as we’ve ever been.
Along the way we met more good people: a woman who let us take the canoe through her manicured front garden early one morning, the many cyclists along the flat paths who wave and call to us, the boatmen and port users who offer advice for the river ahead, the country cars who beep as they pass, or even the onlookers who take photos as we carry around the locks or looked on in surprise as we curled into tight foetus balls on the floor of the canoe and slid underneath three bridges in a row which sat just 2ft off the river.
High locks, low bridges, long stretches of water, and short shorts… another week on the continent.
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