We’ve been taking regular long walks along the canal that runs through Narbonne. What a great addition to a city landscape! To the south it becomes rural pretty quickly, but to the north we enjoy walking through town and seeing lots of live-aboard boats.
To the south are generally spiffier-looking boats, then country. But it doesn’t sound much like the country. The last thing we passed on the way out of town was a highway, which we then heard for as far as we walked.
A monument to a young woman and her brother, who drowned in 1841:
To our surprise, a big splash alerted us to a critter. I can’t imagine swimming around in that murky water, but it seemed happy enough. I’m guessing it’s a nutria, but aquatic rodent identification isn’t one of our fortes.
The downsides of going south are that it passes two rather stinky sewage treatment plants and the path becomes quite uneven as we go out of town. So we’ve usually gone north:
They’re serious about flowers here – even the wall between the lock and the river has flower boxes:
Past the lock, country sets in again. On the west side of the canal are a long stretch of shared community gardens.
Speaking of gardens, even some boaters join in:
And speaking of boats…. If you’re not a boat fan, you can stop reading here!
Some are classic:
Some, not so much:
Some are a business venture. A long stretch has Le Boat rentals waiting for the summer boating season.
I don’t know if there’s a French version of the EPA, but it seems unlikely that doing your fiberglass work over the water and letting everything fall in is legal. This may help explain why the canal looks like green milk of magnesia…
Our French Adventure 