Is it summer yet?

Tanlay, Canal de Bourgogne.
Summer in France.  Hot, lazy days, warm nights, time to look for a tree to moor under and stay cool – oh yeah.  Where is it?
Earlier I posted about the stinking hot days in Paris and worried that we would have to high tail it to the country to stay cool. Well that lasted two days and that was back in June.  Since then has been a succession of cool grey and often gloomy days with glimpses of sunshine and a couple (literally) of lovely sunny days that made us think summer had finally arrived.  Perhaps our summer was in May and June which were delightful, but we want more.  Actually the weather was a blessing in Paris but now we are cruising again it has much more impact on our experience.

We enjoyed the Yonne as it had a succession of interesting towns (Joigny to the left) and pleasant cruising with the exception of the excruciatingly slow locks - but the rivers are not as intimate as the canals.  They are wide, have more trees and you can’t tie up when you feel like it. They are at the bottom of the valley so you don’t get to look out over the fields, only up.
Our domestic battery bank (the other bank is for the engine and bow thruster) wasn’t holding charge so it was time to replace them.   The sticker indicated they were installed in 1994!  It was certainly time.  The guy at the marina said that may be a record.  Not cheap though.  $1,000 (BOAT= Bring Over another Thousand) and they weighed about 150 pounds each.
We are now on the Canal de Bourgogne which climbs over the hills to Dijon with more locks and the highest elevation of any canal in France.  Since commercial freight traffic stopped a few years ago it has been neglected; there is a lot of weed and the depth is not good. On the canals you can supposedly stop anywhere but when the depth is a challenge you can’t always get to shore.  So you get the bow in and then pull the stern (with the sensitive parts) in gently as far as you can.
Now the canal is starting to wind more and get prettier. The villages are quaint with many of the buildings made of stacked limestone.  No mortar. 

Although there are signs of the decline that seems ubiquitous in rural France, there is still life and we can always find the morning pain au chocolat and frequent little restaurants.

Tanlay, as well as having an astounding Chateau, is the starting point for some of the hotel barges that frequent this canal. We were lucky to get the only free spot on the quay.  As they move slowly and take up a lot of mooring space we will be trying to avoid them.

Internet is sparse or  non-existent .  Even our 3G dongle only crawls along.  Seems that everything is slow in the countryside, so it might be a while before this gets sent.
This afternoon we set off to go one lock to a nice small village but the mooring was too shallow.  We nearly got stuck in the mud, so we went two more locks and stopped just before a fantastic thunderstorm.