The last post

Sunday afternoon in Sydney. Claudia is just home from soccer ("so destroyed"), Freddy is at his dad's for lunch, Sam's along the road working a day shift in the bottle shop, Mike's downstairs playing guitar, Po (our cat) is on patrol on top of the garden wall, and Alex, well, he's sleep-walking in the weak winter sun. Jet lag. We're all present, all accounted for except for Enki II. She's the missing one. At least she's well polished on her topsides.

We left her four days ago in the care of the good people at Port Napoleon, with her papers in the best order possible. Perhaps I worry too much. I know I worry too much, actually. On our last day, waiting to hear from our customs agents,  I was as strung-out as I've ever been in my life.  I don't like loose ends, and I find myself panicked by the thick fogginess of  French bureaucratic buck-passing. The fog will lift. One day it will lift. You have to trust that it will lift, once you've done everything possible to establish your position. We have done everything possible.

So we said goodbye to Enki, dropped the rental car off at the Avignon TGV station and took the train to Paris, which  - as they say - we'll always have. We wandered, which is by far the best thing to do in Paris, anytime. In August, when lots of businesses pull down their shutters for the holiday season, Paris has a lovely idle tempo, like Sydney between Christmas and the middle of January.  For the poor sods who can't get away to the Riviera the city stumps up umbrellas and cushions on the banks of the Seine. People bake in the sun anywhere they can. The tan is the thing.

We ate in a small restaurant near the Bastille, and pretended that this was my 50th birthday celebration.  The waitress looked like Juliette Binoche, and sure enough, she was saving to study acting in New York.  My 50th birthday is long gone, but it's never too late to celebrate your 50th birthday in Paris. We did it well.

There's no reason to continue this blog that I can find, except for the pleasure of putting it together.  I'm going to deny myself that pleasure until we begin our travels on Enki II - hopefully at the start of the next European spring.  Probably I'll make a new website - seems logical. Between now and then, Alex plans to go back to Port Napoleon to supervise the work we've organised to be done on the boat - probably in November, after Dave and Pauline's wedding and before Christmas. By then, we'll have shipped across the boat gear we took off Kukka,- lines, anchors, tools, galley stuff, wet weather gear and so on - and he'll stow it aboard, ready for when we take off. We don't yet have a set plan, but we think we'll go east pretty quickly. Skip the crowded seaside towns of France and Italy, and head for Croatia, Greece, Turkey.  Who knows though. There's a lot to happen between now and then.

Until that time...

The season is nearly over

We're picnicking on Enki tonight. We and the fearful mozzies. The floorboards are rattling because Alex has been methodically taking them up to look what's underneath, but hasn't put the screws back in yet. It's hot tonight. The French are happy because summer should be hot. July, our friendly fruiterer told us, was a catastrophe. In Port Napoleon, boats are coming out of the water again.  There are a lot of transporter trucks appearing around the yard. The holidays are nearly over. Boats are on the move, overland.

This week has been stressful. Oh yeah, you say. A week in Provence is stressful. Tell me more. I'm not going to. Only to say that if you throw French customs into the proceedings, even in Provence you can wake at 4 am and lie awake thinking and worrying until light comes.

The main thing is that it seems to be sorted. Our Australian registration certificate arrived today, and with that we can go forward.

The week would have been less interesting without our new friends, the girls from Nausicaa. Here they are polishing her hull (below). Ori, the darker of the two, is the one in charge. She's Israeli, and I doubt there's any sailing job she'd not be up for. Her friend Ziffy, whose home address is a post office box in Antigua, is one of those girls you never forget. Perhaps we'll see them in Australia before the end of the year. We'd like that.

Like Ori and Ziffy, we've been polishing and buffing. This evening, before the sun set and before the mozzies discovered my tasty body, I shuffled around the deck on my bottom, rags and marine polish in hand, bringing a high (protective) shine to the above-deck duco. Alex is grateful - his body isn't made for shuffling. Since the sun set and moon rose over the Rhone we've been nibbling at pizza and dealing with
a bottle of rose. We bought the pizza slices in St Remy de Provence, after we'd had lunch in one of those mainstreet French brasseries which offer you a two-course lunch for 15 euros ( as you know, the euro doesn't pack the punch it used to). A morsel of steak, some apple pie. Eight hours later, you are still enjoying the meal. French food. There's good reason to take it seriously.

We went to St Remy because we were searching for a bricolage (a hardware store) to buy a polishing machine. We found three bricolages but no polishing machine (we think the French don't do DIY). Instead we bought a rug and some cutlery for Enki. Walking about St Remy reminded us of the first holiday we ever took together, in Provence, in 2002. Three weeks. That's all we could take back then. As we drove from St Remy back to Port St Louis, cross-country, we both recognised the stretch of road where we'd stopped so I could pick poppies.  We still have those poppies, dried between the covers of the Mariners Weather Handbook.