Woke early (start of jet-lag) and went for walk in the mist up to the Cacor viaduct over the River Tarn. Can't promise we'll be up this early again after the jet-lag wears off! The rising sun in the mist behind the silos was quite spectacular.

Called in to Hilda May to say bye to Stuart & Christine who were returning to Reading for a few weeks for some work and gigs. Decided we may cruise with them when they return, cause that’s when we were thinking of starting to cruise in early June after Rita gets back from Bern.

Later in the morning, we went up to the SFR office, and met Mattieu again (after it initially looked like he wasn’t in, he appeared from the back room - phew!). In the past two years, he had been very helpful with phones/internet, so we hoped our luck would be with us again this year. He recognised us from before, and within 30 minutes, he had found a house phone/TV/Internet package and two mobile plans for EUR99/month – about what we pay for 1 Optus mobile in Australia! However, we could not get the mobiles without a Carte Bleu bankcard, so we headed off to Credit Agricole to try opening a bank account. We were booked in immediately for a meeting after lunch at 1330h. We went for a quick coffee at L’Ovalie, where we found that Kevin was no longer around, then went back to the barge to gather the required papers for the bank interview. Despite some problems with us being married but having different surnames (this blocked the online registration process and would not let it continue), the two girls who attended to us had it all sorted and signed us up for an account including cards and internet banking with 2 hours. Sometimes the French can be very efficient. We then went back to SFR, where Mattieu signed us up for the landline package, and told us to check the Tabac across the road for the hardware when it arrived in the next week or so. In the meantime, given that we couldn’t get our mobiles until the Carte Bleu arrived from Credit Agricole, he gave us his personal password to access the SFR Public Wifi network – as usual, excellent service from Mattieu, the reason why we keep going back to SFR.

In the meantime, we have also got mobile phone access via a SIM that we got when we booked our rail tickets from Barcelona to Toulouse. The Australian office of Rail Europe which mailed our tickets to us at Taggerty also sent us a free “International SIM Card for Travellers” for a system run by RailPlus eKit (www.railplus.ekit.com). Checking out online reviews of eKit seemed to be generally favourable, and offer a viable (and relatively inexpensive) option for having mobile coverage while travelling in multiple countries. So we put the SIM into one of our phones before we left Taggerty, registered it with eKit and then loaded it with $50 credit via www.rechargeminutes.com so that it would be ready for use when we got to Barcelona. We have tested it a few times since being over here and all seems to work as advertised. The essence of the system seems to be that (for non-USA usage) you get a UK phone number through which all calls are routed. To phone to 180 countries, you simply dial the country code of the country you are calling (even if you are in that country), then the number you want. This request goes to the UK system, and then you hang up. In a little while, you get a call back after the UK system has dialled the number you want. You then wait until they answer, as if you’d made the call direct. The charges are modest at about 50c/minute; so OK for short calls, but not great for long rambling calls. Since we wanted such a mobile service for emergency calls when we were travelling, this seemed ideal, especially as we could then make calls from Spain, France and Switzerland, which we would be visiting over the next few months, without having to get a separate SIM card for each country. When you go to a new place, the phone searches for a local carrier (it will find the best available) and then uses that carrier to make the call to the UK. For people wanting to call you, they simply dial your UK number. Such calls are free to you, but I’m not sure what they cost the caller (probably the same as if they were really calling someone in the UK). The advantage of this system is that you get “International Roaming” without the traditionally high costs associated with International Roaming with your home carrier. One can also use this SIM for data services, but we probably won’t do so; rather, we will use the WIFI in the port until we get our SFR mobile phone SIMs, and then use them as HotSpots to connect to our computers and iPads. Once we have the SFR SIMs, we can also use their Public SFR Wifi system, which has around 5 million hotspots spread around France (see the map below of Moissac hotspots to get an idea of the coverage, even in a smallish rural town).

All in all, a fairly productive day, given that we had been advised that opening a French bank account could be tricky. Owning the house in Moissac seemed to be the key that opened the doors!