Leaving Mulhouse

Quite a pleasant mooring at Mulhouse, small, almost full, quite expensive.

Of course the highlight for me was the National Motor Musium with a very extensive collection of Bugatti cars. Strange I never really associated Bugatti with France, Italian name but it is French and very impressive engineering. Next time through if there is a next time the Train Museum.

Just one of the many Bugatti exhibits

Leaving Mulhouse the locks are still operated by an Eclusier who we had to book for a set time to start. We chose 11am and were told that it was insufficient to get to Dannemarie some 24 locks away if we left so late. It seems everyone heads there, but we were happy just getting to Elingen, moored outside a bar with signs to say open, but no sign of life.

Moored at Elingen

France is full of cafe's bar's shops and so on, often saying open 24/24, to me this means 24 hours a day and 24 days a week. But to them it seems to mean all day every day, except Sunday, Monday, lunch time, holidays, low season and when they don't feel like opening. So more often than not they are shut. But then when they are open they still look shut, so unless you try the door you never really know.

There are a number of lift and swing bridges on the canal, often a keeper stands there all day ready to close the road and open the bridge for every boat passing. On a good day that can be as many as four.


The following day we carried on, stopping at Dannemarie for lunch at a bar on the quay, excellent and very busy, mostly with cyclists.

Dannemarie Port

The canal path has been uprated to provide a good green route and it sees hundreds of cyclists, especially at weekends. After lunch we went through a ladder of 13 locks in just over two km, not as impressive as Devizes, but not bad. We ended up at Montreux-Chateau, the name sounded interesting and probably was the most interesting part. There was a restaurant barge moored at the port with a menu, but again no sign of life. We never did find a Chateau. So we cycled back to Montreux-Vieux, also an interesting name.

The next day, Monday we started descending and after lock number 7 were given a remote control to operate the fully automatic locks. We have encountered remotes before for locks, usually a small fob with a button to press. This one given to us by a lock keeper who handed it over said something in rapid French and disappeared, was in a large box complete with a charger, six buttons and instructions.


As we approached the next lock and opened up the box, we found that our instructions were in German. OK, once we understood how it worked then it was fine, but the device needs to establish a connection with the lock before you press any buttons. That was not initially understood, so we spent a while at the first automatic lock. By coincidence or more probably because, the boat behind us was German and they were given instructions in English. A quick exchange and all was well.

One of the automatic locks