Vitry-le-François and 7 more locks, Orconte

From Contrisson, the plan was to catch up on the missing locks from the previous day.

We had looked at Vitry-le-François on the map, clearly, we will not stop here. On Google, it looks like a small commercial port, in one corner there was still some space for the sports boats, only how to get in there. So we decided to aim for the next mooring after Vitry-le-François.

Here the canal splits, to the left it goes towards the Houte Marne, Saonne, to the right towards Champagne, Reims. In the commercial port there are Péniches, mostly converted into housing, a bit like Amsterdam. Some of these former cargo barges are also decaying. On the route from Contrisson to here, one of them came towards us under construction. For our yellow angel, that must have been like a national holiday, his eyes sparkled with pride as he announced the encounter to us.

We quickly left the place behind us and finally drove in the direction we had already taken a week ago on the Canal-Champagne-Bourgogne.

For the statisticians, since our departure on the Canal des Vosges, we have covered 168.68 km. In doing so, we have conquered 108 locks. The bridges can be read in the screenshot above.

That's according to Adam Riese and Eva Zwerg, 1.56 km to a lock. Drive in, lift the pole, the lock reacts, no, lift the pole again, the light on the gate flashes, if all goes well, then it moves too.

For die-hard DYClers, to illustrate, this route is like Kandel - North Cape, 13 times back and forth, but you have to tackle 4.2 locks per trip. I'm sure some would look for a different port under these conditions. So the desire to reach the Mediterranean must be pretty strong.

After we had received the remote control at the Écluse du Désert, n°71 / Canal-Champagne-Bourgogne, as the part is called, we were in good spirits and wanted to continue.

The door doesn't open, but the yellow angels mastered that with flying colors too.

Today the grill should come into action, well, a day later the fish would probably have been cooked on its own. But from lock 71 the distances between the locks were noticeably larger, so we arrived at our berth with the last lock.

And we were not the only ones.

Orconte