contentedsouls

1 lock, 5 kms

As we woke on Saturday morning our phones started to ring; the family rarely know where we are (very few of G’s family read the blog) so were concerned due to the terrible events the evening before. We had only just put the news on ourselves and it was still all sinking in.

Staying where we were wasn’t an option as the cloud had made the bank above the steps too greasy for G or I to get up and down and it was the only way out with the dogs. The sun was shining and we had planned to drop down into St-Vit and walk into the village in the evening to listen to Marc’s band playing; he later confirmed, as we expected, that it had been indefinitely postponed. We moved on but our hearts weren’t in it, so we stopped a little further down at Osselle where we hadn’t stayed before.

With the sun once again dancing attendance I was able to take some prettier pictures of Maroc before we left.

The one lock we did go through was filled with some very dodgy looking froth; the hull was still covered in it when we moored.

G was extremely noble and cycled the 15 km round trip to the nearest shop at St Vit to make sure that we had meat, veg and wine for Sunday lunch. Whilst the cycle was out, I set off with Muttley to see whether or not he’d stay with me, at speed, off lead. He was amazing – much to my surprise – the only problem was that, being the weekend, the club cyclists were out in their hoards wanting to overtake us; not possible unless we stopped and pulled over which we had to do with annoying frequency, so we gave it up and resorted to the more conventional method of exercise and walked (my bum also got very sore, very quickly, on the bike).

On our travels we found one of the little ‘holiday resort’ type beaches for camping/caravanning. It was, of course, closed and fenced off with locked gates on 3 sides – quite strange as the 4th side was open and we were able to go and play on the beach for a while; sadly we hadn’t thought to take bucket and spades and the crème glace kiosk was closed.

Waterways wise we are now officially in the winter season which means we have to ‘phone before 3pm to book passage on the day before we wish to cruise. We have 4 different telephone numbers for this waterway and we tried them all to book passage for Monday morning; one wasn’t answered and three were answered by a fax machine. Hey ho.