Il Pleut

O bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits !
Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie,
O le chant de la pluie !

Paul Verlaine

The forecast for today was, after twenty-four gloriously dry days, for rain. I hadn’t bothered looking at Apple Weather because it had been so inaccurate in recent days, but over breakfast Ian showed me a radar picture on his phone which showed a slow moving band of rain moving over the whole country, due to hit us at about 10.30 as we walked out of Condé and straight (very straight!) along the canal to Chalons-en-Champagne.

We took the obligatory photographs with Denis underneath the old station sign which he had rescued and put up on the wall in his farmyard, and set off in full wets in expectation of precipitations. Denis was of the opinion that it wasn’t going to rain very much, I suspected he was just telling us what we wanted to hear.

It took us awhile to get out of Condé. I confidently walked back to the canal and turned right along it, to pick up the path that we had left. It ended in a dead end because the canal came to a T-junction, on which we needed to turn left, which necessitated a different route out of town so that we would come along the top end of the T on the far side of the water.

We had now left the Canal de la Marne a l’Aisne and joined the Canal Latéral à la Marne. The basin where the two joined was a working industrial area of more grain silos beside the water. Above our heads was a feeding frenzy with a large cloud of swifts, flying low in the cooler air to work the insects trapped in the lower air masses.

The water here was remarkably clear.  There was no sign of the 55-lb carp that Trevor had been fishing for although I did see one fish that was about a foot long. It was also extremely shallow, with a fine pale silt covering the bottom of the canal and the waterweeds too.

The canal flew over one of the Marne tributaries, the Ruisseau d’Issay, the Issay stream, whose mint and white chalky waters joined those of the river, to flow on to the Seine, and from there to the Channel, and the Atlantic.

We set off at a smart pace, aiming to get as much of the walk under our feet as we could before the rain set in.

At first the canal was much as yesterday’s: a swift asphalt towpath and lovely greenery,

with the odd bridge to enliven things (not much!).

The clouds were quite high, and the forward views were clear and lighter, filling me with hope that we might dodge the rain.

But the weather front was coming implacably at us from behind, and as the first drops fell, Ian got an extraordinary poncho out of his pack and covered both his entire self and his rucksack with it.

He looked ridiculous!  But at the end of the day both he and his pack were completely dry.  The same, dear reader, could not be said of mine. The weather held off, though, and I was beginning to think that Farmer Denis was correct in his weather sense.

One of today’s huge haul of water birds appeared in the far distance of this exceptionally straight canal: a solitary swan.  It wasn’t particularly interested in us and the same could also be said of the way we felt about him.

Ahead was a lock but so far ahead we couldn’t tell whether the boat on our side of it was actually moving. Eventually it came into sharper detail as it neared, and we could see it was a huge, slow-moving barge.

Its deisel engine churned up sediment in the water behind it, and that was the end of the relatively limpid blue-green canal.

If had come through a lock ahead of us and we  now made sense of the little boom that hung over the water with a piece of plastic piping hanging from it.  It was the signal to call someone to come and open the lock.

It also made sense of the two vans that had been going up and down the towpath.  That boats were going so slowly that there was plenty of time between their calling for a lock-keeper and their arriving at the lock for one to turn up in a van and get the lock working.

The lock keepers stopped briefly to chat to us; I gleaned that it would take about 10 minutes for the lock to fill up with or empty of water. That seemed rather unlikely to me. The lock was immensely long by English narrowboat standards, I thought.  But that barge had been huge.

We moved on towards the light.

By 10.30, as forecast, the rain began in earnest. The flat surface of the water no longer reflected the trees; it was an ever-changing pock-marked green plane, although still beautiful in its way.

Even in the rain the canal path was not empty.   This friendly fellow came to meet us. His name was Newton, and the portentous name reminded me of Nestor the pug whom I had met in the heat on my way to St Thierry.

Just before midday we came to the A26 motorway bridge, with piers underneath that seemed to have been coated with anti-graffiti paint. They looked brand spanking new.

It had handy rocks to perch on to eat the rest of our breakfast baguette whilst listening to a grey wagtail, its song magnified in the cavernous space. It was exceptionally nice to get out of the rain for a while, although it was too chilly to rest for long.

A group of brightly coloured young cyclists flashed past us with dance music blaring from a speaker. They were all in the highest of spirits, pumping the air with open palms as though they were in a club.

Two wet men and a defeated lad came along sometime afterwards, all looking depressed and absolutely sodden.  However wet we were, we agreed smugly, at least we weren’t cycling in the rain.

But in truth, we didn’t find this walk so bad.  For a wet day, it was so much better to be moving fast on asphalt than sliding about on chalky or clayey gravel roads and woodland paths, on a dead flat path than risking slipping and taking a tumble on a downhill slope.  And we agreed it was better to be doing two hours of this with good company than such a monotonous walk on our own.

The path agreed too.

And so passed three hours thirty-six minutes on the canal towpath, two hours and thirteen minutes of it in the wet.

It was enough to make us cold, though.  We came off the towpath by the cathedral, sand debated whether to go to our accommodation where Mme Monique said she had left the garage open for us to to shelter in, or to a café for a hot drink.

The latter option won: we traipsed through the city (for city it was, to my great surprise, having expected another champagne town), taking surprised note of a number of timber buildings,

And also a general air of dilapidation in great contrast to the champagne towns of the region we had walked through.

We found the main square in the Old Town, full of restaurants with soaking wet outdoor tables and steamed-up windows.

We chose a café-brasserie and let ourselves into the warmth, standing dripping on the mat whilst waiting to be seated.

Ian, once he had his enormous poncho off, was dry underneath. I opened my rucksack to get out a dry layer and discovered that not only had the rain run off the rain cover onto the spine of the rucksack (which was somewhat to be expected), but also that it had soaked the outside of the drybag, the fabric of which had let in the water. My down gilet was really quite wet inside.

I couldn’t see whether anything further down the pack was wet, but then I couldn’t do anything about it at that point, cramped damply into a window seat surrounded by wet outerwear. I repacked it, trying to keep the wet sections upper and outermost, avoiding getting the otherwise dry items wet in their turn. Stephen, whom I texted with the news, suggested finding a bin bag for to wrap everything in.

Dealing with all of that could wait. For now it was a hot chocolate and a salmon pasta bake and salad.

We slowly warmed up our cold fingers and soaking trousers, becoming primary contributors to the steamed-up windows.  By the time we left it had stopped raining, and our trousers (my waterproof ones and Ian’s thin walking trousers) were dry.

The garage that Mme Monique had left open also had two chairs kindly put out for us, but no sooner had we divested ourselves of our coats and replaced them with warm fleeces, than she returned, cheerfully letting us in, quite unfazed by our appearance.

She switched on radiators around the place for us to dry wet things on, found me two bin bags for my onwards journey, and hung up my gilet against a tower radiator. By the time we came downstairs from sorting ourselves out she had hot tea on the table — and rose biscuits, a Reims specialty, for she herself is Rémois.

Stats for the Day

Distance: 21.07km

Time: 4:13

Pace: 5km/h average

Elevation: 28m!

Vaguely interesting waterfowl seen: 2 (swans)