Straight after breakfast, I Googled “Comparativ Assurances Automobile” as advised by the car sellers wife, and found the LeLynx.fr website. After entering all the details about ourselves and the car online, they gave us a quote of 465e/year for Fire, Theft and 3rd Party Property Insurance. This seemed competitive with what we’d seen elsewhere, so we went ahead and signed up, with a follow-up phone call, and then some online sign-ins. All pretty painless.

We then took all the Carte Grises paperwork (the Transfer Form signed by the seller and us, the cancelled Carte Grises from the seller, passport, and evidence that we lived at the address we'd given - we took our gas bill that had arrived that morning) to the Prefecture at Castersarrasin to transfer the registration papers. However, they would only accept payment by cheque at Castelsarrasin (no cash, no cards) and we do not have a cheque book (we have since asked for one from Credit Agricole to cover such situations in the future such as at the supermarket where they seem to accept cheques from anyone, but check every single banknote if you try to pay with cash!). Also, the seller had failed to sign the Carte Grises when she cancelled the registration for the car in their names. So we went round to her place and she signed the form, and then we headed for the Prefecture at Montauban, since they were open over lunchtime and also allowed payment by card. It also gave us a chance to learn how the car GPS worked, as the seller's wife programmed it to get us to the Prefecture at Montauban (basically it was the reverse trip that we had done on the bus from Montauban Station to Moissac Station on Wednesday night).

We found the Prefecture at Montauban OK, went through the preliminary check and then waited for 40 minutes for the Carte Grises tellers. All seem to be going well, until the officer on duty said that the signatures of the sellers wife on the Carte Grises and the Transfer Application Forms were different. We know this was not the case, since we had seen her sign both forms in the past 24 hours. But nothing we could say or do was going to change the officer’s mind – she was convinced they were different and that’s all there was to it! Seems like she could easily get a job in the Long-Stay Visa section of the French Consulate in Sydney!

So we collected all our forms again and headed back to Castelsarrasin to tell the seller's wife the story. She said she would then come with us to the Castelsarrasin Prefecture again that afternoon, would re-sign the forms if necessary, and would also make the payment with one of her cheques, and we could then give her the cash. We presented exactly the same forms at Castelsarrasin as we had at Montauban, and not a word was said about signatures. Ten minutes later we left with our temporary Carte Grises, while we wait for the permanent one to arrive in the mail. We then went back to the seller's house and had a lovely sweet mint/absinthe tea, and a chat about a range of issues. Turned out that she knew Mme Eva Katz from the Moissac Urbanism Dept, who handles the renovation program in the selected areas of Moissac (which will assist with work on the façade at 71 Rue Gambetta). Seems that the sellers have a property near the Post Office which is also getting assistance via the same program, so they could be useful down the track. The seller's wife was such a delightful and helpful person that we will be keeping in touch anyway, and probably taking her kids for a ride on the barge when we pass through Castelsarrasin on Sunday.

Late in the afternoon, we went over to 71 to read the water meter and turn on the water. Having done both these tasks, Rita then rang Veolia and signed us up for a water supply account. We then headed out the back to the garden, where we did some more deadheading and trimming of the roses. I also took down one of the lengths of wire fencing surrounding the gardens (can't really understand why they were around the garden in the first place), and used the wire mesh to make a compost bin for the garden refuse, thus killing two birds with one stone!