It was raining when we awoke last Friday and, although it had stopped by lunchtime, it was a pretty miserable grey day, so much so, that we lit the stove. Although the weather’s returned to full sun every day since then, some of the nights have been cold and we had a couple of frosts too, so we’ve ended up setting the stove on several evenings.
While Karen’s been working, I’ve been getting the boat shipshape
and stocked up ready for when we leave. That
hasn’t really entailed a lot, things like servicing the engine and topping up
with diesel, but it sounds good. Karen’s
working full time until the end of the tax year and, if she carries on after
then, will go down to three days a week.
That way we will have four clear days a week for cruising and exploring
together and three days where Buddy and I can do our own thing 😉 We’ve
decided that while she’s still working five days a week, we’ll keep the car
with us so we’re not having to worry about finding mooring spots in walking
distance of shops etc. With this in mind,
I spent one morning checking out the first couple of places we’ll probably stop
at as we need to be sure there’s a decent internet signal for work.
The first stop was Chepy, about ten kilometres and one lock
south east of Châlons-en-Champagne. It’s a quiet wild mooring that we’ve stayed
at before and the signal seemed fine when I stopped to check it. The village is a little way away from the
canal and is typical of those in the area, no sign of any life when driving
through giving me the feeling that I’m trespassing on private land.
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| Probably our first stop |
I then carried on a further five kilometres or so to Pogny, where there’s a new quay in the village with a water point. Other than checking the internet signal I wanted to see if the water was on and hadn’t been turned off for the winter. The water was on but there were three commercials moored on the quay. There would just be room to get in behind them, but we’d have to use our spare hose as well as the normal one in order to reach the water point which was in between the two boats moored quayside. The boats will probably have gone by the time we get there as I noticed a grain silo a bit further up with a boat being filled and a couple more waiting behind it, so I suspected the boats at the village quay were waiting their turn to move up to the silo.
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| Quay full at Pogny – water point is silver thing next to the car and grain silo in the distance |
As you can imagine, space is at a premium on a narrowboat, so we are trying to be as efficient as possible in terms of Karen’s workplace. We went out last Saturday to buy a wireless mouse and keyboard in order to reduce the clutter created by unnecessary wiring. When we got home, we found the wireless keyboard wasn’t sans fil; it was wired! One of my Monday jobs was to take it back to Darty, the shop where we bought it, and get it replaced with a real wireless one. My French can’t have been too bad as the assistant understood and allowed me to swap it over although I was charged a bit extra as it was wireless. It wasn’t until we were setting it up later that we realised the keyboard was laid out in the French style even though the photo on the box clearly showed a QWERTY not an AZERTY keyboard. So, on Tuesday I had a third trip in four days to Darty. Unfortunately, they had no wireless QWERTY keyboards in stock but at least I had my money refunded without any fuss. We did rather feel like we were having a Hutchins saga: our boater friend Chris Hutchins is always recounting everyday stories about things that take him at least three times as long to do or resolve as they should do but at least his are normally through no fault of his own.
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| Box shows QWERTY but actual keyboard is AZERTY |
The one thing stopping us moving is the lack of a working washing machine. Whilst at Darty picking up the keyboard and mouse on Saturday we asked if they had the slimline model we needed. They didn’t have it in stock and said we had to order online (the same applies with Cdiscount, the other chain of stores that sell the same model). We were back to square one because we couldn’t order online as we didn’t have an acceptable bank card registered to a French address. In the end, Mike & Aileen kindly stepped in by ordering it for us and we transferred money to their French bank account. The order has been confirmed and the machine should be with us between 5th and 11th March. We waited with bated breath.
Having made and altered our cruising plans for 2021 yet
again, I did a final check on Sunday. I
wanted to make sure I’d taken all the planned and current emergency stoppages
into account. To much disbelief and some
irritation, I realised that I’d misread the planned closure of the entire 224-kilometre-long
canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne. This
was going to be the canal we would take down to the river Saône within a week
or so of leaving. We have tried getting
down it on each of the previous two years only to be thwarted by closures
because of water shortages. It now transpires
that it is planned to be closed for the whole of April – I had read this
previously as March - hence the third time unlucky. As we’d planned a
circular route, it now looks like we’ll be tackling it in the opposite
direction hoping that the Champagne et Bourgogne still has enough water at the
end of summer when, fingers crossed, we can come up the other way.
I’d rather hoped, that during our remaining time before we set off, to see the progress of the renovations of the passerelle we'd watched being lifted off the canal last week. Those hopes have been dashed as we realised on one walk that a frame was being erected around it. Not surprising really as it means the restoration can continue whatever the weather throws at them and by later in that afternoon the structure was covered.
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| Frame around the passerelle |
Around lunchtime on Wednesday, I received a phone call on our French phone. My immediate thought that it would be about delivering the washing machine and for a while the conversation was very difficult. I was assuming it was the delivery people when in fact it was someone ringing from the centre processing our applications to join the French healthcare system. To compound issues both places are based in Reims so when I asked where they were calling from it didn’t make things any easier. All was sorted in the end and I was able to answer the questions posed. A little while later I received another call; this time it was the delivery driver confirming where we lived, a bit surprising as it was two days before the earliest delivery date I’d been given. When I explained we were on a boat he asked me to go to the road and look for a camion yellow.
He soon arrived and just
parked at the side of the road nearly blocking the entrance to a
roundabout. He didn’t care about the
queue of cars forming behind him either.
He brought the machine down and put it on a trolley and kindly wheeled
it all the way down to the boat.
Unbelievably, he just left the lorry open and the rear door up so anyone
could have got in and take any of the packages.
The thing that really got me was the way he parked and trolleyed the
machine over the road without caring about traffic or thanking people! Saying that, he was a lovely guy and could
have just left the machine at the entrance to the port. It didn’t take long to plumb the new one in
and we soon had the washing on to make sure all was OK.
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| Washing machine test successful |
Later on Wednesday we had another keyboard accident: water spilt over my laptop. After 24 hours drying it out upside down about two thirds of the keys were working again. Some of the keys on the right-hand side either didn’t function at all or resulted in the wrong action e.g., pressing ‘0’ would result in’p0’ being inserted at the start of the line. Having ascertained earlier in the week that none of the local shops had wireless QWERTY keyboards in stock we reverted to Amazon and are awaiting delivery of one on Saturday. After another night drying out it was a good step forward on Friday morning to find that only the delete and enter keys weren’t working. This was a great news and means the laptop was usable again and at least we’ll end up with a wireless keyboard that Karen can use for working which is how the keyboard saga started.
On Friday Paul helped me load
the old washing machine into the car and off we went to the déchetterie to dispose of it together with quite a few
cartons of used engine oil that has built up from services over the last couple
of years. The modern equivalent of rag
& bone men but in white vans rather than the horses and carts I remember
from my childhood were stationed at the entrance to the tip. I stopped and asked if they wanted any of our
rubbish and they gladly relieved me of the washing machine. It was a relief in two senses as the guards
at the déchetterie can be quite officious when checking paperwork and what’s
being dumped, and we would have been stuffed if they hadn’t let us in. We were OK though and were let through, so mission
accomplished.
When we got back, Bill and Guy were waiting for me. They had been trying to buy their boat licences for the year but the log in page kept crashing. They wanted to know if I had bought mine. I had been on earlier in the week to check out prices etc. and hadn’t had a problem so I said I’d have a go at buying ours. A 17% discount is given for annual licences purchased before the end of March meaning the cost of €550 is very reasonable at just over half the price of the equivalent in the UK. I logged in and purchased mine OK and then all the guys came down one after the other (Paul had had issues too) to buy their licences through my laptop. Bill kindly printed ours out in colour and laminated it for us for the trouble.
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| The final item ticked off the ‘Let’s get going’ do list |
So, we don’t think there’s anything stopping us setting off on Sunday now – hopefully the next update will be from somewhere else.
Stop press: when Karen was
setting up her workstation on Friday morning, she found the monitor wasn’t working. Somehow the (two-week-old) HDMI/VGA connector
had snapped so another trip to the computer shop was required ☹
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