Dijon - Hotel California

After the flat lands and ruralness of the journey so far, one has expectations on turning up in Dijon. Expectations of facilities that perhaps are not available in the back of beyond, but will be in a city.  Well those expectations are unfounded - the port of Dijon has gone native.  All the guest moorings are taken up by the raggle taggle resident or unused boats.  The other moorings with electricity are for hotel barges. There are no signs or information for boaters.  It's every man or woman for themselves!

Lots of birds around the port and on the island including some geese I had never seen before.  Bar headed geese I think.  All of Dijon awaits just a few minutes bike ride away.  Good cycle lanes here - and a large vegetarian/organic store and cafe near the post office. You can get a map showing all the designated cycle routes in the tourist information.

You can see how early in the season we are.  The trees have not come into leaf.

At last we have left Dijon!

Dijon felt a bit like the Hotel California.  We could head out any time we liked, but until we found a lock keeper, we could never leave.  As Dijon has absolutely zero information for boaters and we wondered how on earth we were going to find the elcusier to open the locks for us to leave.  We decided the only thing we could do was to sit the boat in the next lock and wait.  At least that way no boat could go up or down without us moving first (but there are so few boats at the moment, that we could have been waiting for days!)).  At 'Eclusle Larry' lo and behold, we found that the lock keepers cottage was a little VNF office where the lock keepers hang out.  But they certainly keep their whereabouts close to their chests. Everyone assumes the VNF office is by port, the one which is permanently boarded up!