Since we bought the Renault Scenic last year, Rita has been saying that she would need to learn how to drive a car with a manual gearbox, so that she would not be dependant on me driving her everywhere in France. She had taken a few lessons in Australia, and today was to be her first driving class in France. She said that all seemed to go OK in the parking lot in which she did some practice gearbox work, and then she went out onto some country roads for real-life experience. Her instructor was apparently pleased, even when they met a truck on a winding country road that was taking up his side of the road and a little bit more.

In the early afternoon, we paid a visit to Credit Agricole to sort out some banking issues. Our friendly assistant from last year, Natalie, had left the branch, but we were attended to by another young lady, Sandrine. Even though she didn’t understand why I was not able to access my account online, she appeared to very quickly sort out the issue of not being able to get onto online banking, by issuing another temporary password by SMS, and instructing me to log on when I got home to my computer and then changing the password to my own preference. We then talked about the problem of being able to make large payments (for furniture, appliances and other items over the coming months), and described our problems in trying to pay for the beds by credit card. Even though we transferred sufficient funds via OzForex into our Credit Agricole account before we came over, it now seems we are not allowed to spend it, with a limit of 450euro/week from an ATM, and 3000euro/month for credit card or online transactions. At this rate, it would take us most of the next year to use all the funds we transferred. We tried to understand the reason for such restrictions, but the closest we got to an explanation was something to do with security. Seems that in order to stop other people from spending our money, we also have to agree not to spend it. Finally, Sandrine suggested that I could upgrade to a Gold Card (which is actually blue!) which has slightly increased limits and then get a Comfort option, which temporarily (for 2 months) increases the limits. We agreed to go with this as the best of the limited options available. I hesitate to think of how I would have run TUTI over here, when we regularly had payments of hundreds of thousands per month - I guess there must be different systems for business, but no one so far has mentioned the option of the random number code key that I use in conjunction with my Westpac account back home. When I got back to the barge and tried the new password for online banking, it still didn’t work!! I guess I’ll take my laptop with me next week to show her, when I have to go in to pick up my new Gold/Blue Card.

As we walked back to the boat, we saw Graeme and Sandra who had come back today to their Piper barge Effie. We chatted for a while and promised to catch up for drinks later, after they had recovered from the 2-day drive from England. In the afternoon, Rita went swimming at her favourite swimming spot on the River Tarn down under the Cacor Aqueduct.

In the evening we learned via Facebook that Kaz’s Dad had died that day. While he was only fairly young (63) he had a hard time in the recent past, and so his passing may have released him from more pain. Our thoughts are with Kaz and Iain.