Sunny and warm. Up early. Mike went for bread and when he got back we all decided to move on a bit as we were fed up with the dog alley stink. Charley set off first. Mike chatted with an American couple off a hire boat, they were finishing their holiday soon and were off to Paris for a few days on Monday then London and a flight back to Rhode Island, New York. They were interested in hiring a boat in the UK next time as they said they were tired of not being understood! Nick ‘phoned to say the mooring was OK at Haute Rives and there was room for us, we said we’d see them later. We set off at 12.40 p.m. just after the American couple left. It took us a while to get the pole, stakes and ropes in and, of course, as it was Sunday afternoon promenade time we had a large audience. No boats moving as we crossed the aqueduct but loads of promenaders. One guy was thumbing a lift, we all laughed as he was going in the opposite direction until a couple of minutes later when he started racing back and shouting. An elderly man dropped a bag and kept walking towards him. The hitch-hiker picked up the bag and carried on to the picnic tables at the end of the aqueduct. We reckoned someone had seen he’d left his picnic lunch bag on the table and walked off with it! Strange thing is he didn’t say anything at all to the old man as he passed him. Peace and quiet returned as we left the aqueduct behind. A couple of boats, Amalia and Lagon who had gone past us the day before, were moored in the first layby and a couple more boats were moored along the bank after the first set of flood gates having lunch. We moored in front of Charley at 1.45 p.m. at the former Berry Plaisance hire base. Said hello to the man from the house as he came down to his boat which was moored at the uphill end of the quay. He remembered us from last time, which must be more than ten years ago. Nick said he’d been washing his boat down earlier. Later he and his wife took their cruiser for a trip down to Briare and back. The Internet was still on 3G. When Mike returned he said that as he passed the two boats moored in the layby just before the aqueduct the second one, Amalia, had decided to wind and instead of doing it in the layby where it was wider, he had winded by the boat in front, Lagon, and the canal wasn’t wide enough so he had jammed across the canal, with his dinghy, (which was hanging on davits on his stern), dragging along the superstructure of Lagon. Not very clever. Then when Mike was setting off to come back in the car he had come up to a road junction where just one car was coming towards him at speed, so he checked the other way, saw the passing car out of the corner of his eye and started to pull out – except the car had missed his turning and stood on the brakes which meant he was directly in Mike’s path! Wonderful! And if he’d hit him it would have been Mike’s fault !! While he’d been away passing traffic had been very busy, a pénichette had arrived and moored in front of us, filling the last of the available mooring space on the old quay. A car had arrived and there had been much banging of doors and clattering about before the car and the crew of the pénichette departed. Lovely clear night sky and not much local light pollution so we looked for meteors. Saw several, and a couple of satellites, before we went inside as it was starting to get quite chilly.
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