Well! Here we are at the start of a new season of cruising. As usual we have spent the winter months dividing our time between France and England – and Spain this year.
Ken and Rhonda had taken a luxury apartment in Estepona for two weeks (reduced from €800 a week to €120 a week) and invited us to spend a week or so with them. We opted for the middle 5 days, as the flights from Leeds/Bradford were perfect. Good call, as it turned out, because poor Ken and Rhonda had had a week of sorting out problems before we got there! In the first apartment they were allotted nothing worked, but the second one was a bit better, and by the time we arrived, they had sorted out all the problems!! Of course, not even K and R could eliminate the motorway 20 metres behind the bedrooms, but c’est la vie! At €60 for the week, cheap flights and excellent company, we had a fabulous 5 days – we saw Gibraltar, drove inland to isolated villages in the hills north of the horrendous Costa del Sol and gawped at the rows upon rows of luxury (and we mean luxury) yachts in Marbella harbour. Wonderful!
In the UK we drove up to Scotland to see Alex’s cousin Mary and her husband Martin, and went for some brisk walks in the freezing wind, one of them with their friends Mark and Sue who had walked over the hills (two and a half hours with all their survival gear) the night before in the dark for supper!! A different lifestyle up in the wilds of Scotland!
Then in February back to Buzet, where unusually it had become very, very cold: so cold in fact that ice was forming on the canal. Alex monitored it day by day and when at last it reached 9 cms thick he designated it safe enough to skate on. Of course, every boater in France carries everything for all eventualities, and thus Alex delved into deep store under the stairs and retrieved his ice skates and he was off. One of the real plusses was being able to collect fallen wood from the opposite bank where normally no-one goes as it is very difficult to get at. So not only was Alex able to skate up and down the canal over a good distance but he was also able to give us heat and warmth for free for the whole of the rest of the winter here in the south of France.
Our first taste of this unusual phenomenon was when we drove over for dinner and overnight with Charles and Caroline on CONNIE downstream of here. In the morning when we woke, there was 4" of snow everywhere. Of course this far south they don’t expect such an event, so they have no snow clearing equipment and all the roads stayed just virgin snow! That’s OK if you are familiar with driving on snow but it was obvious that many of the French drivers had never experienced anything like this before. So half of them were driving as if there was no difficulty at 100 kph, the other half, as if the end of the world had come, at 20 kph. This made for an interesting return drive but as we only saw a dozen or so other cars on the whole trip, it wasn’t too bad.
During this very cold spell we also made a trip over to Argeliers to spend a couple of days with Peter and Nicci on AURIGNY. We all went into Narbonne for a look round but it was freezing cold with a biting wind and we were glad to get into a nice café for lunch. Narbonne will have to wait for our return on Riccall so that we can give it a proper going-over.
Peter is working hard on AURIGNY to comply with the new TRIWV rules for boats over 20 metres and one part of this involved removing the short lengths of very corroded chain from the anchors. He was pondering how to do this when Alex suggested making use of the thick ice that was all round their boat. So Alex and he lowered the anchors one at a time onto the ice, dealt with the chain and Peter was also able to engrave the name of the barge onto the anchors with his angle grinder (another requirement for the TRIWV).
On our return trip to the UK we spent the night at Le Mans and did a quick drive round the 24-hour racetrack which was fun and then when we got to England, on our way to Somerset, we had a picnic lunch at Thruxton racetrack, dropped off at Stonehenge, Woodhenge and Wells Cathedral. We spent a few jolly nights with Alex’s brother David and his wife Bun in Somerset being entertained by film and live music, then set off north. We had offered to pick up a replacement car for Jamie from South Wales as his had been written off by his insurance company. When all came to all and we got the address details, it turned out that the car was as far into Wales as you can get before you fall into the Irish Sea - way beyond Haverfordwest! So hey, ho, a bit of a diversion, but we convoyed it back to Newcastle without a hitch, calling in on Julia and Steve en route.
We had popped across to north eastern Wales in the late autumn to look at a lighthouse which was for sale, but Alex still has his dream of buying and renovating a windmill (back to old fashioned sails but generating electricity) and with this as a goal we set off on a final UK recce. We had already looked at those in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: this time it was to be the Midlands and Norfolk. At the end of the day there was one in north-eastern Norfolk (coincidentally near to our boating friends Ced and Suzie’s home base) which might have been a contender but when it took us 3 hours just to get to the A1, never mind the 2 hours to get to anyone we know, we felt it was a step too far. Still, we had had a good week and a lovely evening and night with Ced and Suzie.
Alex still feels he needs a winter project for next year so we will continue looking next autumn. Watch this space!! But in the intervening 6 months, we have a lot of boating to do – travelling back east across the Garonne and Midi and north up the Rhone and Saone. We’re sorry to be leaving the south of France with its (usually) wonderful weather and all the friends we have made down here, but we will almost certainly come back again when we have travelled the rest of the thousands of kilometres of canal we still have to do in France, Germany, Holland, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Rumania, Russia and . . .
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