Rain

Last night we once again spent a large part of the time sensible people spend asleep, sitting quietly in a restaurant with Celine and Dume pondering our life in France, their life in Australia, and everything in between.

Having come tot the conclusion that we will probably not live long enough to run out of things to ponder, we reluctantly headed north, back to the boat where our plans for the cruising season were about to come to fruition, and where we had the makings of a quiet and early night before heading off in the morning.

The speed limit on the motorway is reduced by twenty percent when it's raining though, and our five hour drive was quickly turning into six, as we ploughed on through what looked like drought breaking, if not torrential rain. The first floor planter boxes in Nancy had looked brown and crisp a day or two ago, but now we wondered if there was serious danger of them being washed away.

The phone rang despite the rain, and we found ourselves taking a diversion back to Lagarde, for a "quick" bite with Jacques and Maggie.

"Quick" of course does not mean exactly the same as it does in other places, and yet again we found ourselves struggling in the pouring rain, to find our way home before the dear little rental car turned into a pumpkin.

Not to worry, it was we thought, a nice way to begin our cruising season.

Tomorrow we would be away!

Residency

Despite the brave reporting by yours truly, the relentless pace of our social life is beginning to take a toll. We woke slowly to the delightful news that our celebrations on Friday night had not been wasted, and Jacques' boat had indeed been bought by our fellow Captains from Cambrai.

Shortly after, Bob and Penny disappeared in a cloud of fresh picked strawberries, leaving the rest of us to go about our day's business which, apart from deep and meaningful discussions about a myriad of sculpting painting photography things, and perhaps an hour or two in a monster building supply house finding bits for the boat, was really to attend another meeting with the famous French bureaucracy.

Nothing is straightforward in dealing with immigration people in any country as far as I can tell, and the country that gave us the word bureaucracy is notoriously the manufacturer of the most complex mazes, refusing contact by telephone and email adds a further level of difficulty to the game.

It came as no surprise then, when at the appointed hour, standing before the desk of our "case officer"  the immediate answer to our request to collect our Cards was "NO!".

But there was a very slight, but very clear twinkle in the eye of our adversary. "Not unless you sit down, because if you don't, I will be forced to stand and I am far too lazy to do that", he remarked.

He disappeared for an uncomfortably long period, and came back with two Identity Cards and a receipt marked "gratuit" (no cost). We have no idea why there was no cost, nor why our first cards were issued for ten years, nor indeed why we are allowed to work if we choose, but we couldn't have been more surprised nor grateful.

I don't think we would have been happier if someone had given us a small chateau.

We had been warned.

We have often not failed to notice the tranquility of Sunday mornings in rural France. Everything is closed, every shop, every shutter, every eyelid we suspect,  and apart from the door to the odd boulangerie filled with people intent on procuring their supply of bread for Sunday lunch there is almost no sign of human habitation.

We've also made a note of how, at precisely four PM, the whole of France seems to walk out of the doors that comprise it's parts and simply wanders en-masse around the nearest thing worth wandering around.

And so it was, that with lunch not quite complete, we, four Australians and a couple of generations of French families wandered by the serpent's lair, vicariously enjoying our risk taking, and wondering if anyone had actually been deterred from trespassing despite the warnings.

Surprisingly perhaps, we escaped unscathed, and we all arrived home safely laden with a few tonne of strawberries from Jacqui's patch, in time for a very long dinner indeed.

Circus

Life has been a merry go round of late, a constant tide of people and activity has swept us up, and today it was time to roll the circus south once more to Orleans.

We've marvelled before at French motorways, and we marvel every time we travel on them. Twenty kilometres from where we begin we drive through a toll plaza and take a ticket. Then we set the cruise control to the one hundred and thirty kilometre an hour limit, stop for lunch and a few hours later we arrive at a toll plaza less than twenty kilometres from our destination.

It all seems so simple.

This time, the first twenty kilometres took more than an hour; twenty percent of our more than five hundred kilometre journey. We were met by thousands (yes thousands) of motorcyclists assembling in downtown Nancy to protest new laws which will require them to wear high visibility jackets, (and to have number plates so they can be caught in radar traps) and I suppose we might have been sympathetic except for our own selfish agenda.

Eventually we arrived in Orleans, more than a few hours after we had planned, even more hours after  Bob and Penny, but none the less well and truly in time for tea, and drinks and dinner and tomorrow.

We had managed to get off the merry go round but found ourselves ever so firmly seated on the swing!

l'Excelsior

After a brief "hiatus" when business and blogger  took over from the job in hand, our story continues from where we left off:

I'm not sure how it all works, but in a strange land we found ourselves surrounded by familiarity. When we counted the heads in the evening there were six around the table from the Antipodes. So full is the harbour of New Zealanders and Australians that we all wonder how we will ever learn to speak French, or if when we do, if we will ever find anyone else who can.

The interior of l'Excelsior has not been changed since 1905, the menu may have undergone some slight modifications, and some of the wine was a certainly a little younger and at some time which didn't seem at all too far into the evening, it was Bob who noted that it was 12:30am tomorrow, and we really should get an early night, as when we all arrive in Orleans for the weekend we may be in for a somewhat less relaxing time.

So we retired.

We felt surprisingly unselfconscious as the cameras followed our every move through Nancy and into the Place Stanislas, ordered coffee and pretended to point and smile, all the while whispering sweet nothings in each others' ears.   

Four coffee grandes later, in mid afternoon the filming was done, we'd waved our goodbyes to the TV crew from Saar, hoped that they'd treat us kindly in the final cut and wandered slowly back to the boat.  Wondering about what had just taken place.

We'd changed plans of course, several times during the day, the weather hadn't been kind and the lock at the end of the canal was closed, for no reason in particular, in fact some said it was open, we were going to stay down on the river for the evening, but there was no sign of life in the lock and without any disappointment  given the circumstances, we had returned to Nancy for the evening.

That was when we found we had a new neighbour in the harbour, fast asleep in his saloon.

Our Tony had tracked us down.

Golly, another long noisy night ahead!

Nancy

Somewhere from beyond the galley I heard a muffled voice announce that it was nine.

I poked my nose out from below the covers and half opened one eye. There was just no way I was going to get out of bed until the temperature reached at least ten even if the time was well past eight, so I reached for the trusty computer to see what was going on in the world.

A few boat parts were on their way, arrangements were being made for our visit to the Orleans Prefecture office on Monday. Sue had made it to London. Bob and Penny were in Paris and might to try to see us today.

I had to read that again.

Bob and Penny were in Paris and might to try to see us today.

I fired off an email explaining that I thought a five hundred kilometre detour for a cup of tea was probably a bit extravagant, and suggested that if they were to stay a night or two we could make them TV stars, telling them that we had a entirely clear notion of where we would be by the evening as we'd made arrangements for our TV crew to find us in the morning.

But Verangeville isn't all that pleasant a place to stay, all  and despite our having waxed lyrical to Barbara about the joy of entering cities through the canyons of decaying industry, Nancy lying just nine kilometres down the waterway seemed to us to provide the prospect of greater joy.  In an effort to cause complete confusion all round, we motored on past the point of no return.

Eventually, through sheer fluke, we found each other, or was it they who found us?

No matter, the night was long and noisy in a muffled and civilised sort of way.