Rhianna headed off to Nice this morning on the early train from Moissac. She is continuing her European trip alone, but for this first leg of the trip to Toulouse she will have the company of Mike from Calandra, who we met waiting at Moissac station.

Since even Iain’s big battery charger had apparently not succeeded in charging the generator battery, I decided to follow Phil Tyson’s advice that the most common cause of electrical problems is whatever you changed last. So I thought about it and realised that the last thing I had done was to fit a new “kill switch” which connects the battery to the generator. I checked it out again but could not find anything wrong, so I called in the professionals (Phil). He came over with tools in hand and dived into the engine room. Because of the awkwardness of working on the kill switch, he took it out completely and found that one of the connections was not fully tightened. When load was put on it to start the generator, it was therefore unable to deliver the required ampage (I realised that I had been the one to not tighten it sufficiently because I was trying to tighten it from an awkward position - lesson learned for the future!). Once tightened and placed back into position, the generator started immediately - there was never a problem with the battery!. While he was down the hatch, Phil decided to check all the other battery connections, especially for the home batteries, and found one with a lot of corrosion, to the point where it needed replacement. So I went up to the local auto electrician and used my best French to get a couple of replacement connectors. They weren’t exactly the same design, but they did the job (and now I’ve got an extra replacement if ever needed).

Later in the morning, Iain came over and finished the maintenance on the generator (now that it was able to be started) and on the main engine (now that the new fuel filters had arrived in the mail).

While Iain was doing this, I did some slightly less technical jobs by attaching the rearview mirror and saddle bags to my bike.

As a thank you to Phil, I offered to drive him to Buzet to get some wine from the Wine Cooperative, which he hadn’t visited before. I knew what I wanted for the trip north and next year, and Phil quickly took a liking to what was on offer. As we looked at our shopping trolleys at the end of the expedition, we were grateful for the free bottle they gave us (because we bought so much!) and for what it would have cost in Australia if we had bought this much wine of the same quality!

That night we headed over the St Nicolas de la Grave for our final gig. KickShins had headed back to the UK so we were sharing this gig with Jazzelas, a Moissac jazz band with which Rita sometimes plays. We didn’t play in the kiosk (bandstand) this time, because the Mairie had left a stage in place from a recent Jazz Festival. About 100 people attended, and while the sound and bump-in/bump-out were probably better than the kiosk, the atmosphere was not quite the same as in 2014.