France and Switzerland 2014 - Day 4

I'm writing this after 3 glasses of champagne and 2 glasses of wine. Those of you who know me realize that I have no business trying to do this but I'm going to try.

Today we left Paris at 1pm. We were picked up by Jim from the Papillion Barge. We discovered this barge trip a few years ago when we saw it on a Rick Steves PBS TV show. Werner wasn't up for the trip then. When we realized that he could possibly travel again, Susan jumped on booking our 6 day cruise.

The drive to where the barge is moored is about three hours. Jim broke-up the trip with a stop at the Vaux le Vicomte, a chateau and gardens from the 1600's built by the architects of Versailles. I'm reading a book about Madame Tussaud and the French Revolution. I think it skewed my enjoyment of such an excessive display of conspicuous consumption. It was pretty impressive though.

I was more impressed with myself though when I climbed up to the dome on the top of the

chateau. I met Rick and Kyle up there and took this photo of Werner and Susan below. You can see a green speck in the middle of the picture which is Susan's shirt.

I dozed off and on for the rest of the trip to the barge but woke to see this beautiful
rainbow.

I don't know if I can adequately describe our arrival to our beautiful barge. It was as if we were living a dream: the peaceful canal, the fairy tale-like boat, the lovely crew who greeted us with glasses of champagne, the baa'ing of the sheep in the distance, the incredible light of the lowering sun. So very perfect!

Have I mentioned we are the only five guests on the barge? What a luxury. The crew consists of Cedric, the pilot (don't know if that's his exact title), Jim, the van driver and tour guide, Finley, the chef, and Abby who seems to do everything to help us. They totally made us feel at home and relaxed.

Those of you who know me, know I'm the pickiest eater ever (a fact I'm not proud of but resigned to). I made a pact with myself 
that I would not make an issue of this on the barge so I gave no instructions to the chef of what I would or wouldn't eat and that I would try things I normally wouldn't touch. (The heaviest thing in my suitcase was the bag of protein bars just in case I couldn't follow through on my pact!) I also decided that I was going to experiment with the wine. Hell, we're in the ultimate of wine countries! So...dinner tonight was amazing and even more amazing, I ate fish! I also loved the white wine, and tried the red.

So it's now Monday morning and I'm trying to upload some photos on this blog and it's not working and it's stupid for me to spend the time doing it and not enjoying the moment. I'll try later.