Chaos continues

Last night we discovered it's been a week since we decided to leave all the stuff in the hands of our chaps, a week where we seem to have toiled almost without ceasing, except for the odd dinner, coffee and excursion of course, while our chaps have been off doing other things. Chaos continues to reign aboard. We have no idea how the two bags full, each with just nineteen kilograms of stuff we brought with us can no longer fit on a ten metre boat, but it can't. The fact that all of the lockers have copped the leak fix and the scrub today and are empty for now, doesn't help of course, and there normally is a place for everything somewhere but today there isn't a place for anything, and we haven't a clue how we are going to rearrange it to deal with the damp over winter.

It will all stop on Friday, it will. Almost everything has been cleaned to within an inch of its life, and all the preparatory work has been done so the chaps can march in when the snow starts and do the fixin' stuff.   Even if I don't get the diesel heater working tomorrow we'll call ourselves ready to hit the trail as soon as our dinner date is over on Thursday. That's been our plan all along, to get the jobs done a fortnight early, so we would not have anything hanging over our heads when a flurry of friends arrived to spend our last week with us.

But plans are only made so they can change. We heard today that Björn and Sandra, the "charming young German couple" we met in Mallacoota will wisely but regrettably not be driving the seven or eight hours from Hamburg to visit, as they are fantastically in the first stage of pregnancy. As fate would have it, our partners in crime from Orleans have seen the weather forecast and perhaps equally wisely they too have decided to do something involving museums and galleries next week instead of travelling for more than half a day on saturated motorways to sit in the rain under blankets with us.

We are disappointed of course that we won't be seeing them, but now strangely look forward to the time alone.  One last cruise to farewell the season. "Strangely" because we have apparently been alone for a few weeks, yet it seems as though we have had a companion invading our space, upsetting our tidy little lives, upsetting our tidy little boat and worse, he's been upsetting our tidy little lack of routine.

His name is "Work" and while he's been fun to have around for a short while, we will glad to see the back of him!