Auxerre

We arrived in Auxerre by accident, really — a canal boat we’d rented further south needed to be returned nearby, and the marina happened to sit directly below the old town. Pulling in slowly on the water, with the tiered rooftops and the cathedral’s tower rising above the Yonne’s bank in the early evening light, gave us a first impression of Auxerre that I don’t think we’d have gotten arriving by road, and it set the tone for the two days we ended up staying.

A cathedral over a much older crypt

The Cathédrale Saint-Étienne dominates the skyline from the river, a Gothic building begun in the thirteenth century with stained glass that rivals Troyes’s for quality if not quantity, including a striking medieval rose window. But the building I found more affecting sits a short walk away: the Abbaye Saint-Germain, whose crypt contains Carolingian frescoes from around 850 AD, among the oldest surviving wall paintings in France, faded but still legible after more than a thousand years — saints and scenes rendered in ochre and red on curved stone vaults lit only by a handful of small windows. Standing in a room that old, under paint older than most of the cathedrals we’d visited on this trip, quieted both of us in a way the grander Gothic buildings hadn’t quite managed.

The Yonne, slowly

Auxerre sits at the head of navigable stretches of the Yonne and the Canal du Nivernais, and the town has clearly made peace with being a boating hub rather than resenting the tourists it brings — the quays are lined with cafés rather than closed off, and locals walk their dogs along the same towpath the rental boats use. We spent our last evening simply sitting at a riverside table with a bottle of Chablis, which by that point in the trip we could finally taste properly, watching the tiered old town go from gold to grey to lit windows as the light dropped, the cathedral tower the last thing still catching any sun.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn, when the river is at its most active and a canal boat rental or a simple riverside evening makes the most sense weather-wise.