Besides the hiking below Mont Blanc the barge trip on the Canal de Bourgogne (Burgundy) was our main purpose for this vacation trip. Our friends have a friend who is part owner of the barge Derrineel and we joined them for a week on the canal.When we first talked about this trip I thought a week on a barge going 6.5 km/h (4mph) would be boring, but I had not checked the part of the canal we would travel and how many locks there were. On a small barge like this everyone on board has to help, particularly during the time in the locks one person is needed to assist the driver (“captain”). By the time we were done we had gone through over 100 locks!
The Derrineel was build in 1998, is 14.9m long and 3.3m wide. It is powered by a little 48hp diesel engine. With the folding bed in the saloon it sleeps up to 6 people.
We started our barge trip in Venarey-les-Laumes and ended it in Dijon. The Canal de Bourgogne winds it way through very rural land here in central France. For most of the way it’s lined by tall trees on both sides. The portion that we traveled climbed from about 240 m (787 ft) over 27 km (17 miles) to 378 m (1240 ft), then we went down over about 48 km (30 miles) to around 240 m (787 ft) again. On the way up we passed through 55 locks with each lock giving 2.5 – 3m in elevation gain. On the downhill side we passed 54 locks with similar elevation changes. Locks are as close as 200 m (650 ft) with the longest distance between locks at the peak (including the 3.33km tunnel) around 5km (3.1 miles).
Each lock has a lock keepers house. Some of these are now abandoned, some are owned by non-lock keepers, some are vacation rentals. There were probably a few that are still inhabited by lock keepers, but these days a lock keeper is responsible for several locks. He or she will follow a barge along for a few kilometer and open/close the locks. Mostly these guys were riding on little motor scooters, but some were using cars. Each lock keeper house has the number and name of the lock on it. They also had little benchmarks indicating the elevation. They were all build identically initially it appears.
To allow the canal to go over a hill like that it is fed from reservoirs which were build for the purpose of keeping the canal filled. At the time of our travel there was an advisory to try to put multiple boats through a lock at the same time if possible to conserve water since the reservoirs were not full.
Below are some impressions from our time on the canal and from the little explorations we did from our overnight stops. Unfortunately not all stops did coincide with interesting surroundings.
