barge in the French wine country

How about a hint on a price. A lot of those things involve chartering the whole barge and that will stiff you maybe five thousand euros for a week .....bring friends. There are a couple on the Burgundy Canal that run a thousand euros per head for three or four nights, but that's usually in the off season. What us poor folks do is rent a self-drive boat for a week. That costs not much more than a medium- to low-priced hotel and if you eat breakfast and lunch on board, you're pretty much breaking even. Locaboat.com has them all over the country. I've done it three or four times, but not in Burgundy since it's just not my favorite part of the country. If you go this route, avoid the Canal du Midi since it's a lot like bumper boats at a carnival. Operation of the boats is a cinche and you pull over and tie up anywhere you wish.

Ed, thanks for that information. We were just talking about those boats at our Sacramento area RS meeting yesterday. I like the idea of the self-drive boats that you can stop when you want, etc. I have seen shows where they show people riding bikes alongside the canals. I wonder if they have boats that include bikes?

On the chartered barges they come with the deal. On the self-drives you rent them from the boat company for a bit extra. We did that once and decided it wasn't worth it. Now, if once of us gets bored, we just hop off and walk along the path for a while. You don't need them to get into the towns, since there's plenty of things to see within easy walking distance.

Ed, I'm curious about what part of the country youlike to boat in, since you say Burgundy isn't your favorite.

My two best trips in France (both with locaboat rentals) where down around the Carmarque (the route was essentially Lattes to Beaucaire through the national park area) and one in Brittany that went north and ended in Dinan (I think that one's been discontinued, but another outfit might be covering it). The last batch of trips have been in the Midlands of England; which I'm going to do again in a few weeks since I've really come to enjoy it (more pubs).

Kat, the computer I'm using right now is NOT comfortable to use LOL, so I'll have to check on this later, but I recently came across a very reasonable self-drive barge website. Came with bikes, too, Andrea ;-).....It was a European site, not just France, and there was a wide range of barges to choose from. Each 'route' came with a list of towns you could stop in for buying food, restaurants, laundromats, etc., and the touristy things, too! These were NOT the kind that came with Captain Stubing, Gopher, and Cookie! YOU are the cookie...I'll do a little more Googling on this and find that website again. This doesn't really help you, Kat, but because this question has come up many times recently I thought I'd toss this bit of info out here...

There is a Rick Steves podcast available on this site (under the Rick on Radio button, bottom of the page, program archives) that discusses barges in France in great detail. Rick's guest that day was a barge operator who is British, but has lived in Burgundy for 20 years. It might give you some good ideas about cost and possible trips.