A week long Loire Valley barge cruise with European Waterways was a truly relaxing and slow paced journey with intimate service, gourmet food and wine, and visits to out of the ordinary sights in the French countryside. Before there were planes, trains and automobiles, France developed a vast network of canals that were used to transport goods from one part of the country to another. These canals connected to the major rivers and also to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
The canal network made it easy to move all manner of goods from one part of the country to the other, and in particular, allowed Parisians to easily taste the delicacies from all corners of their realm.
Today, the canals and their many locks are used primarily for recreation. European Waterways expertly manages a fleet of 12 luxury barges that ply the many canals of France on a variety of itineraries. She may have been a beast of burden in her previous life, but in her current incarnation, the Renaissance was now beautifully appointed and modern.
And as the flagship for European Waterways, she and her crew certainly set a high bar in all aspects. Hadrian, the captain of the Renaissance barge, picked us up at the Westminster Hotel in Paris around and drove us about an hour and a half to the small city of Montargis where our barge was waiting.
While the crew prepped the barge to start our first afternoon of slow cruising, I explored what would be my floating home for the next 6 days. The barge can accommodate up to eight passengers — however, on this cruise there were only 4 guests total, the same as the number of crew on board.
