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.