"In the faint, gray light of early dawn, the barge lay like a shadow on the water." So begins Maigret and the Headless Corpse, set on the Canal St. Martin (if you read French, the French version is more thorough, but is, of course, in French), which at the time of the book was still used as a shipping route, bringing good into and through Paris and out to the Seine. Now the canal is used primarily for tourists who wish to take a boat ride through the canals of Paris. (One can also take a boat on the Seine, and in fact that is much easier to do.)
There are only a few boat companies that take boats through the Canal St. Martin, partially, I expect, because there don't seem to be all that many places where two boats of any size would be able to pass each other. One of the ones that does is Canauxrama, which takes one boat from Bastille to Parc de la Villette and a second boat back every morning and afternoon.
The second Sunday of Mom's visit was beautiful, sunny and pleasantly warm, and we decided that it would be a wonderful day to go on a cruise down the Canal St. Martin, so we headed off to Bastille, and bought our tickets at the little kiosk along the quai. The ticket seller told us that they would begin boarding the boat in about 20 minutes (45 minutes before the scheduled departure, but we wanted seats on the top of the boat, not in the cabin underneath), and so Blaise and I rushed off to the Bastille street market, leaving the kids and Mom to admire the boats bobbing about the water. A rush through the market netted us bread and olives to go with the oranges that we'd brought from home, and by the time we returned to the dock, they were beginning the boarding process. Fortunately, they hadn't gotten very far, and so we had no trouble finding seats in the front of the top of the boat.
We settled in to eat our lunch and to watch the rest of the boat slowly up. The captain came on board and left again, but eventually we cast off and made our way to the start of the canal, passing under the Bastille metro station and into the vault that formed the first third of our voyage. At one point, the entire canal was open to the sky, but the first kilometers of it were covered in three successive sections between the 1860's and the 1900's. As we rode through the covered section, the guide explained in French, and again in English, what we were passing through, and at the same time the projector on the front of the boat projected images on the walls and ceiling of the vault. From time to time, sunlight and fresh air and occasionally a trailing vine came in through circular openings in the ceiling of the vault, and everyone jumped up to take pictures.
Once we had left the vaulted part of the canal, we had approximately 4 more kilometers of sailing to go before we reached the Bassin de la Villette, and we needed to go up about 25 meters to get there. Going up on water means only one thing: locks, and the Canal St. Martin has 4 sets of double locks, each set going up about 20 feet. Now, Mom likes locks a lot, so much so in fact that when we once spent a summer living in Seattle when I was a child, she dragged us to the Ballard Locks every day that it wasn't raining, and (since this was Seattle) many days when it was raining too. We hadn't told her that there would be locks on the Canal, and she was thrilled to realize that she would actually be going through locks, not just watching other people going through them. (Blaise revealed at this point that he'd never actually seen locks before.) On we sailed through the four sets of locks, with people stopping on the bridges overhead to watch the water rushing into the locks so that we could move on to the next part of the canal.
After about 2 hours, we arrived at the Bassin de la Villette, which evidently provides most of the non potable water used by the city of Paris (for such things as decorative fountains and street cleaning). Through the Bassin we went, and out to the mouth of the Canal de l'Ourcq, at which point the boat turned around and headed back to the beginning of the Bassin. Those of us who wished to be dropped off at the Parc de la Villette were, and I assume that the trip back went smoothly for those still on the boat. We stopped briefly at the Jardin des Vents et des Dunes for the kids to play, and then headed home for dinner and bedtime.
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