Europe Travel Notes
September-October, 2009

It was a great trip and very easy.  You don't need any super boating skills… we never anchored or anything.  If you want to spend the night in 'country settings', you just pull the boat over to the side at a good spot, pound some (furnished) stakes in the ground, and tie up.  If you want 'city settings' for the night, there are towns all over the place with places to tie up (sometimes free, sometimes about $15 per night).

The boats are lined with fenders, so even people with marginal boat driving skills can't get in too much trouble.  Doing the locks was also easy, after the first one.  We did about 25 locks in 7 days (about 10 of them on a single day, on a side trip up a smaller canal), only 2 or 3 required us to do actual lock work.  The rest, you twist a rope when you arrive outside, wait for the green light, pull a different rope when you get inside, and wait for the lock to fill or empty and then drive out when the gates open on the other side.  In most locks, the water rises only about 3-4 feet, but again, on the one side canal we went up about 50' over 10 locks.

We used leboat.com We rented a Continentale, a 3-couple boat.  It had 3 cabins, each with it's own bathroom/shower.  The cabins were very small, but functional.  The galley was well-equipped, and there's a small fridge aboard with a tiny freezer (ie like Island Time's fridge).  They have some cheaper options if you only have 2 couples.  Depending on the size of the kids, you might be able to fit kids on the couch in the salon.

They have a U.S. representative and so we could book in US dollars, etc.  They are Brit-owned and so the people at the bases all speak English, too.  They rent boats all over Europe (England, France, Holland, etc).  We did a one-way rental in the Burgundy region of France, from Gray to Branges.  It was an easy one-week trip, motoring downstream.  There is another company we saw called locaboat, probably locaboat.com or locaboat.fr.

Logistics of getting there… easiest would be to fly into Paris.  I think I found an $800 USD pp R/T from Orlando to Paris on Air Canada.  You could also easily fly into England and drive or 'fast train' from there.  Or into Frankfurt Germany, and take the 'fast train' to Paris (about $120 pp).

From Paris you can either rent a car or take the train down to Dijon, and a bus to Gray.  (Note the Le Boat people were specifically unhelpful with the bus info… we think they get a cut of the taxi fare, but it was like $1.50 EU pp for the bus and $50 EU for the taxi). 

Buses in France aren't as prolific as in South and Central America, but there is generally a route that runs 3-4 times a day through the small towns in any given region.s  We did find that renting a car was sometimes cheaper than paying for 4 people by train, but make sure you get a car big enough to fit 4 people (for example) and all your luggage.  We ended up with heavy suitcases on our laps a couple of times because the size of the trunk didn't match the seats.  Renting a van, especially for a one-way to Dijon, didn't seem possible.

The trip downriver was lovely.  We lucked out and got a great 3-week run of weather (Sep 15 – Oct 6).  It started raining the day we left… There was one 'cold front' before we got there, but the whole time we were there, it was 70's during the day, and 60's at night.  Not hot, not cold.

We rented 4 bikes from Le Boat for the 6 of us, and that was enough.  We took turns biking vs. driving the boat.  Our general daily schedule was to get underway about 10am, go for a couple of hours, stop in a town about midday, then go for a couple more hours.  You only need to go about 4 hours a day to make the particular trip we did.  All the locks shut down about Oct 15 – 1 Apr, so can't rent during the winter.  July and August is high high season, and everything is full/busy.

If you want to see Paris at all, the closer into the city you can stay, the more expensive the housing, but the cheaper the transportation.  We stayed out by the Euro Disney complex (for free at a friend's timeshare), but paid $20 r/t pp per day to get into Paris (that was the cost of a daily 'anywhere you want to go' transport pass in Paris).  But Euro Disney is about as far out as you can get and still get easy/frequent train service into Paris.

We found out later that there is a website that rents holiday rooms in France, it is called something like gitesfrance.com (or maybe .fr).  'Gite' (prounounced 'geet') is French term for 'rooms for rent'.

A good website for Europe travel information is ricksteves.com, and Rick Steves' guides seem to be the most common travel bible in France.

An alternative trip that looked interesting was bike tour trips through the river/wine region.  We saw people biking.along the bike trails, and saw ads for tour companies.  I think they set things up for you, rent you the bikes, and transport your luggage daily to the next stop, so you can bike around unencumbered.  Looked fun, but no idea about the price.

In general everything in Europe was about 50% more expensive than in the U.S.  (Gas is $7 U.S. per gallon, so it impacts everything).  We ate out once or twice, but generally bought stuff in the supermarkets and made our own meals aboard and in the hotel (so getting a place with a kitchen or kitchen privs is well worth it).  Cheapest lunch we found (street food in Paris) was $6 pp, but if you sit down anywhere, it will be more like $15 pp.  The food is divine, but expensive as hell.

It turned out that our trip was near, but not IN the wine region.  Our trip was in flatter countryside that is mostly farming.  Lots of beautiful/quaint little towns, with a few bigger towns.

We did a side trip on the way back out of the country, by car, into the wine region.  (within the past week, all the regions started having wine fairs, and the German Octoberfest stuff starts within the next week too).

I took my laptop and played with my gps, but none of the charting programs I had had any detail on the rivers of France (it may exist, but I didn't have it).  If I'd had time, I would have scanned the overall picture from the guidebook we got from Le Boat, and used that.  You don't really need it though.  The guidebook has mile markers, and the mile markers are usually on the side of the river every Km.  I did eventually get Google Earth hooked up to my GPS and that was fun (but you need to do the terrain download ahead of time, because we had trouble getting internet).

On the internet… there was lots of wifi around, but nothing unlocked.  I would do research ahead of time, and try to book access to what looked like a paid network of wifi.  Google Livebox France and Neuf France wifi and see what comes up.  Or buy some cellular based access. 

On cell phones.  Our ATT quad-band phones worked fine over there, with ATT international roaming turned on. Once we figured out how to dial it, we could dial each other, and French and German numbers. I think it costs about 99 cents a minute (haven't gotten our ATT bill yet!).  We used it sparingly, but were glad to have it when we needed it.  (I think paid local calls are something on the order of 40 cents a minute, so the roaming charge is not too outrageous).  Sometimes text messages (between ourselves) worked better, because they are only 40 cents each (I think).

Language:  We had one guy with us who had a fairly good grammatical command of French, and 2 others who spent some time listening to tapes and trying to get some language.  It definitely WAS helpful to have a little French, because out in the countryside, not everyone speaks English.  And most people appreciated our lame attempts at French, and then took pity on us and spoke to us in their lame English (which was usually better than our French).  The area of Germany we were in has tons of U.S. presence, so it wasn't too hard in Germany.  But if you got further away from the U.S. bases, it might be useful to have a good German phrasebook.

Bottom line:  it was a really really neat experience.  We loved France and Germany (what little we had time for).  We are already plotting how to go back and stay longer.  Dave was really keen on buying a canal boat—we actually went and looked at a place that had a bunch of used ones for sale.  We looked at enough to know about how much a reasonable one would cost and what model we'd be looking for.