It is 8.30 in the evening, John is reading, Tom is fishing, I am eating cherries. It has been a very hot day we slept most of the day (!) and we swam in the river to keep cool.
After rushing to get to Paris by Thursday (when we were supposed to meet Tom) life has quietened down nicely. No more worries about loosing oil pressure or other technical things. We are definitely in relaxed river mode, still delighting in the absence of tides and the easiness of tying boat at night and, dare I say, also getting more confident in the locks. Arriving in Port of Paris l’Arsenal was very stressful though. Between the one way system, the whizzing bateau-mouches and the waiting for approx an hour in all that hullabaloo (well, we realised later that we were waiting in the turning area of the bateau-mouches, ooops!) outside the lock of l’Arsenal John has become a very capable barge handler and my confidence in him has soared up! We stayed there for a couple of nights, I did 3 washing machine loads and had a quiet time whilst John and Tom did the “sights”We left yesterday late morning, managing to manoeuvre deftly past the hundreds of expensive boats moored there and doing quite well on our first “descending” lock. On the way here we saw a sunken barge, worked through 4 locks (not counting the one out of Paris Arsenal, our first “down” lock) and moored in this lovely quiet woody curve of the Seine 50km south of Paris.
