'b' for bollocks

The title of this entry was my Uncle Henry's description of the boat and the general behaviour of the boating company we had hired with. Little did I know they'd be such a shower of incompétents.

We phoned them first thing to tell them the battery wasn't working and that there seemed to be a water leak. An hour later, a mechanic called Olaf turned up, changed the battery and put a sponge under the water leak! He couldn't fix it, so just put the sponge there so we wouldn't hear the leak. Effective, eh?!

He was also there to replace the battery on the boat that had moored in front of us! He set off in his wee van to go to their aid and got stuck in the mud on the bank. Dad, Wes and Hen had to bail him out! Bloody hilarious.

We set off, with our battery working, and stopped at the next place on the map for some food. It was like a ghost town; although it wasn't really a town. More like a mooring spot for some boats with a restaurant beside and a few wild horses milling around. We had our obligatory glass of rosé while we waited for the pizzas to be baked and then headed back to the "Panthere Rose" (our beleaguered boat!).

Wes and Hen had already prepared a salad (which included some strawberries and grapes and, with dressing, turned out to be delicious) and got the table set (with more wine obviously...). The weather wasn't great today. Whilst we ate, the rain was battering on the boat windows, but it didn't hinder us and we set off towards our destination for the evening - Villeneuve-les-Béziers.

My Uncle Wes was great at keeping us on track and had "the book" (with canal map, places to eat, points of interest etc.) in front of him the whole time! He even planned a matrix so we knew where we had to get to every day in order to reach our final destination on time and how many locks we'd have to do each day too.

I can't remember if we did a lock to get to Villeneuve-les-Béziers, but if we didn't, our first one wasn't far off. We stopped for the night and I had my first shower on the boat - turned out to be pretty fantastic, or maybe that was just because I felt so grimy beforehand.

We dined on the boat once again - not much was left and obviously, as it was Sunday, no shops were open to get anything to add to our plates. There was a pizzeria in the town, but we'd had pizzas for lunch and that just would've been overkill.

A few more games of Boggle - this time with a fully lit cabin - a cup of coffee and off to bed.