20 August 2016, the eleventh day of our cruise, was to be the day we crossed from Belgium into France. We had enjoyed Belgium more than we anticipated, and we look forward to getting back there on a future cruise. But today, we were excited to be entering the country of our original inspiration, the land of apparently endless rivers and canals, villages, markets, great food and wine.

So we farewelled the attractive mooring at Anseremme and headed 15kms (2 locks) upstream to the poste frontière just beyond Hastière.

We tied up to the big quay and headed over to the border control office. I prayed that my rudimentary French would stand up to the rigours of (1) showing my ship’s papers and skipper’s credentials and (2) buying the necessary vignettes for our sojourn in France.

The latter are certificates, to be displayed prominently, permitting passage and usage of the waterways in France, which are controlled by the government agency Voies Navigable de France (VNF). You can buy them for one day, seven days, a month (Loisir) or a year (Liberté) on a sliding scale according to length of boat. Given how far we were into the season, we preferred to buy consecutive month-long vignettes for August, September and October as the best price option. My rudimentary French proved adequate to the task of explaining this to the very nice VNF officers, who had initially wanted to charge us for a full year, and we left the border office armed with three different coloured papers and a plastic sheath to display our vignettes from our wheelhouse windscreen.

Casting off and cruising away from the poste frontière we headed another 4 kms (1 lock) to the town of Givet, where we tied up at the quayside opposite the Port de Plaisance. Givet is an attractive town although without a wealth of sights and museums to keep you there for long. It has an old, large but relatively undistinguished fortress, but it has some delightful flower-filled streetscapes, a pleasant scale for a spot of flaneurie and some decent brasseries and restaurants.

We also managed to catch a wedding while we were there…. nice car!!