Monday 14th July 2008 Lacourt-St-Pierre Bastille Day

Sunny and hot. The three French cruisers went off down to Montauban, and there was us thinking the canals were all closed today! Glad they’d gone as I wanted to do some more washing and wouldn’t risk overloading the electricity circuits while they were there. Mike loaded the moped back in the car and took it to Valence. He came back twenty minutes later as he’d picked up a loaf in Moissac rather than take it to Valence and have to come back on the moped with it. I got on with the chores. The replacement sockets for his toolkit had arrived, sent by Paul’s friend Ron, to replace the ones broken when Mike helped Paul to repair his engine. Ron’d forgotten to add France to the end of the address so the parcel had been via Lisbon (Portugal) after someone had written Spain on the packet! Mike had a cup of coffee with Sheba-Mike and a chat. His mate Roy had gone off on his travels again in his campervan. Sheba-Mike had been transferring his Betamax tapes on to DVD; the colour was deteriorating, but that was a problem with the age of the tapes not the machine. Valence’s pageant was due to start at the beginning of August, it would be very noisy for an hour and a half every night for a week he said! The mooring space we’d vacated at Valence was still free as it was too narrow for anything wider than a narrowboat. I’d just finished eating my lunch and was reading my book when he returned on the moped. Later, around 11.00 p.m. we could hear distant Bastille Day celebration fireworks from the direction of Montauban, but we couldn’t see them.