This year, I had decided, I wanted a vacation that would be luxuriously decadent.
Forget bicycling, I thought. Forget hiking. Definitely forget the spa, where the daily routine includes eight hours of exercise and no fat calories. Forget, for that matter, even the hassle of making my own arrangements. Let someone else do it for me.
So here I was, sitting on a barge, slowly drifting down the Burgundy canal in France, lazily watching the scenery go by: a church spire in a nearby village; an elderly man waving as he sat fishing on the bank; a couple of boys laughing as their dog swam to retrieve the stick they had tossed.
Maybe later on, I`d hop off the barge and go hiking back into one of the villages, or just walk along the canal path. But for right now, with the sun in my face and the gentle motion of the boat-well, another glass of wine and a hunk of cheese sounded good.
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Barging is slowly etching out its niche in the vacation market.
”People are beginning to realize that there`s another kind of cruising available that`s very different than the big cruise ship thing,” said Janice Wolf of the Oak Brook-based Abercrombie & Kent, which added barge trips to its travel itinerary in 1986 and now books trips on 12 barges operating in France, England, Holland and Belgium.
”It`s a deluxe, intimate experience,” said Pat Tyng, who, with her husband Jim, owns French Country Waterways with four barges. ”A lot of the appeal is you don`t have to do anything.”
Instead of the bustling around-the-clock entertainment found on big cruise ships, barge entertainment revolves around watching the scenery slip by and learning (through eating and drinking) about the food and wine of the region. Instead of a passenger list in the hundreds, barge passengers will probably total somewhere between 6 and 22.
And instead of ports of call, most barges carry bicycles that enable passengers to make their own ”ports of call” by biking back into the countryside and local villages whenever they wish. Barges travel so slowly
(about 10 miles a day) that a cyclist, or walker, for that matter, can spend two or three hours exploring the countryside and still catch up with the barge without difficulty.
Barging is not an inexpensive vacation. Trips average $2,500 for six nights, not including air fare (see accompanying story).
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My barge trip was arranged by Rainbow Adventures, an Evanston-based company that specializes in wilderness trips for women over 30.
This, however, was no wilderness trip. It was a 10th anniversary trip for the company, geared strictly for civilized luxury minus the slightest hint of wilderness hardship, and open only to women who had participated in previous Rainbow trips. I qualified because I had gone camel-riding in Africa a few years ago with Rainbow Adventures.
”You won`t have to do anything on this trip,” company founder and president Susan Eckert assured me. ”You can just sit on the deck and drink wine all day if you want to.”
(The trip will be repeated next summer, and open to ”non-alumnae”).
There were 22 of us; we ranged in age from early 30s to late 70s and we came from all over the United States-Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, as well as the Chicago area.
We had taken the bullet train (properly called the TGV, or Trains a Grande Vitesse) from Paris to Dijon. At a speed that reached 190 m.p.h., the almost 200-mile trip took just a little longer than it takes me to commute 40 miles on Metra every day.
In Dijon, we transferred to a bus driven by Patrick, a young, curly haired Frenchman with very understandable English, who had been our shepherd since our arrival at Orly Airport in Paris and who remained with us for the entire barge trip. For the next 1 1/2 hours, we wound our way through the countryside until we reached Pont d`Ouche, about 50 miles north of Dijon.
Finally we rounded a corner, went down a little hill, and there, docked on the canal bank, was our home for the next six days: the barge L`Escargot.
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It was painted a jaunty black and red, with white deck furniture on the front part of the deck. As we walked over the gangplank onto the barge, we were greeted with ”bonjours” by the seven members of our crew and handed glasses of kir royale. That was our first wine lesson: kir, we were told, is a liquor made from black currants. Mixed with white wine, it`s a ”plain” kir, but mixed with champagne, it becomes a royale.
After 24 hours of travel by plane, train and bus that kir royale was as smooth as silk.
The upper part of the barge consisted of the outer deck, a paneled lounge area with sofas, a coffee table and the bar, where passengers could buy drinks between meals, and the spacious dining room. It was early evening when we arrived and the five tables were already set; white tablecloths and napkins, heavy cutlery, china, two wine glasses and a water goblet at each place and fresh flowers.
The cabins were on the lower level. This was compact comfort: they were about 8-by-8 feet, which meant neatness was essential because there was no room for mess. Bunk beds were arranged at right angles, and each had a little reading light. A small table was next to the door, a full-length mirror hung on the back of the door, and there was one small closet. An accordion door separated the room from the tiny bathroom, with just enough space for one person (preferably with short legs), toilet, shower, sink, shelf and towel rack.
My roommate was a woman named Ingrid, also from the Chicago area, who turned out to be as sound a sleeper as I. We flipped a coin to see who would be in the top bunk (me) and who would get the bathroom first in the morning
(she did).
By the time we were acquainted with the barge and the crew and had enjoyed a couple of glasses of the kir, it was dinnertime. Salmon with cream sauce and various side dishes were accompanied by two red wines, a 1980 Chateau Neuf du Pape and a 1983 Bourgogne Pinot Noir.
We were a tired group, and the wine was a wonderful soporofic. Those bunk beds felt mighty good that night.
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Burgundy`s emblem is a snail, so it was fitting that our barge was named L`Escargot. The name was also fitting because we didn`t move much beyond the pace of a snail: very slowly.
We would go through a lock almost every mile. The lockkeepers live in little houses with little colorful gardens, and as we approached, they`d come out (often the whole family, plus dogs) and do the lock honors-adjust the water level and open the gate. If it was lunchtime, of course (between noon and 2 p.m.), the family would be resting and we`d just wait at the lock.
The locks are only 17 feet wide, a tight fit for a 16 1/2-foot-wide barge. It was easy to get off the barge, with or without a bike, while going through the locks. And it was easy to outpace the barge even at a leisurely walk.
Like the barge, our routine was also snail-like.
Breakfast was between 8 and 9 a.m. and included juice, coffee, croissants, and an assortment of cereals. Ingrid and I slept to the last minute every day, and arrived in the dining room in our robes. For some reason, it gave me great pleasure to be sitting in my pajamas on a canal in the middle of France, drinking coffee and eating croissants.
Lunch would be at 12:30 p.m., and dinner at 7:30 p.m. Some days, the bus appeared alongside the canal to take us on an expedition to a chateau or winery. Aside from that, it was all glorious free time.
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Travel through Burgundy and the emphasis has to be wine.
We had two or three different wines at lunch and dinner every day; on our last night, we had four (a bottle for each table of four or five people). It wasn`t a case of just opening the bottle and pouring it. One of our crew members would explain each wine before it was served-its history, what we should look for in aroma and taste and why it was being served with this particular food.
This was serious stuff.
However, this amount of wine led to some pretty silly stuff. As meals progressed, we became louder and funnier (at least we thought we were), telling jokes and trying to abscond with unfinished bottles of wine on other tables. The crew was indulgent, no doubt having seen this behavior many times before (although they told us at the end that we were one of the ”liveliest” groups they`d ever had); toward the end of one particularly raucous lunch, they brought out an unplanned bottle of muscat and didn`t even attempt to explain its heritage over the applause and laughter.
Oddly, other than the silliness, no one experienced any unpleasant after- effects from this massive wine consumption. Two glasses of wine at lunch normally will shut me down for the rest of the day, plus give me a headache. Four or five glasses of wine at lunch on the barge, and I was usually off on a bicycle and looking forward to more wine at dinner.
The second gastronomical focus were the cheeses.
Brie, chaource, chevre, Roquefort, comte, Munster, epoisse-three cheeses were served after each lunch and dinner, with explanations for each, similiar to wine introductions.
The trick was trying not to remember that a tablespoon of cheese has about the same amount of fat calories as a tablespoon of butter. And according to how the bathroom scale had leaped ahead when I returned from this vacation, I successfully suppressed the knowledge.
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We weren`t drinking wine and eating cheese on the barge constantly, however.
Midway through the trip, we docked at Dijon, the major city of Burgundy and spent the day exploring churches and museums and sampling all the wonderful mustards. (I came home with a suitcase of mustard.)
We spent one afternoon at the Abbey of La Bussiere, an old Cistercian abbey built in the 13th Century, and a morning at the Chateau of Commarin in Vandennesse.
Our longest excursion was through the lush winegrowing country southeast of Dijon. This was the Cote d`Or, the hills of gold; we could smell the grapes even while we were on the bus. After a multicourse lunch in a restaurant that resembled a wine cellar, we visited the Chateau de Meursault, built in the 16th Century and holding 400,000 to 500,000 bottles of wine in its cellars.
How can one tour a huge winery, sample its wines, and not buy some? We bought wine as though it wasn`t available in the States. I came away with two bottles of red; several women bought six bottles each and then, when sanity returned, realized the hefty job of lugging them back home.
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Barging was exactly the type of laid-back, non-stressful trip that I was looking for.
I returned home relaxed, happy and heavy (actually, some of the happiness dissipated when I stepped on the scale).
Memories include not only the peacefulness of the canal and the incredible array of wines and cheeses, plus the generally good meals, but also the experience of leisurely biking through the little villages with their narrow streets, wonderful gardens, old churches and lace curtains.
In one town, about 50 well-dressed men and women were enjoying a garden party just off the street we happened to bike down. They insisted we join them, and poured us glasses of wine. They didn`t speak English and we didn`t speak French, but it didn`t make any difference-we were all happy with each other. That`s the sort of memory that sticks for a long time.
I came home with my two bottles of wine, lots of mustard, lots of photographs and a small oil painting of a red-roofed house with flowers brightly spilling from a window box. They all make me smile, and bring back happy thoughts of those seven snail-paced days on the L`Escargot. –
