Back in France

Cushla & John

Just arrived. French weather is fabulous, currently about 30-33 degrees in the heat of the day. We have the air con working already.

Here is a brief update:-

We wanted to subscribe to a French phone company as recommended by others for internet use.

This required a train trip into Dijon to visit the closest centre. Our first attempt was a fail - We had walked the 3 kilometres to the train station early in the morning but had forgotten our train tickets - they were back on board! So we tried to buy new ones through the ticket machine which wouldn’t accept our credit card (it turns out that John was using his ‘new” card which starts June 1st - we are still in May !!!) Oh well, at least we had had some early morning exercise, so we doubled back through town and bought croissants as consolation for breakfast instead.

The next day we left on the 1pm train and ‘sorted' the mobile phone.

With armloads of shopping and still a couple of hours to fill before the next train home we checked in to a favourite place for a drink and then early dinner - guess what? - we missed our train home by about 2 minutes so had to wait another hour for the LAST train of the day!

Then we tried to phone ahead for a taxi from the station back to the boat but the “one” taxi that is in service in Saint Jean de Losne was unavailable - we knew we were destined to walk the distance with all our shopping again!

However, a saviour came when John helped a lovely man off the train with his suitcase. The lovely man then offered us a ride in his car back to our boat. ;-) This lovely man said he worked for DeBeers the Diamond company in South Africa and he travels to Paris every week for work. We were very impressed that he chose to live in this remote and tiny town. Maybe it’s because De Beers doesn’t pay very well because his very old car took 3 attempts to start, with him assuring us confidently all the time that it would start eventually! …which it did… and we were extremely happy to get back to “Waitui”. Or, maybe he’s just not into cars and diamonds are his thing ! Or, maybe French people have ’train station’ cars !

Little Toot just sailed past !