During the long moist winter, the sealant around the bathroom fittings had gone quite black and mouldy in many places, and no amount of cleaning seemed to get it looking respectable again. So this called for our first trip to Weldoms for the season to get some new tubes of sealant. Now I just need to wait for a time without showers when the bathroom can dry out sufficiently for the sealant to adhere to the walls and then to set.

While we were out we went to Intermarche for a few things and found a BBQ (planche) with a good big griddle top. We tried to buy two for when the band arrives, but they only had one in stock. However, they advised us that Intermarche in nearby Valence d’Agen had more of the same model in stock, so we drove out there to pick up another. When we entered the store, we thought it looked a bit dark, and when we took the BBQ to the counter, they told us that they had a partial blackout, but could still process our order. However, the card reader at the Service Desk was not working, so they took us over to Checkout 1 and just pushed us to the head of the queue. The lady at the front of the queue was quite pleasant and let us go ahead of her. However, literally, seconds after we finished our transaction, all the power in the store went out, including all the card readers. The expression on the face of the lady at the head of the queue changed significantly. We picked up our BBQ and departed hurriedly. The ironic thing about the blackout is that Valence d’Agen is in the shadows of the nuclear power plant at Golfech - so much for reliable baseload power generation!

After our evening with Larry and Annie, we realised once again that we needed a new supply of boat cards to give to other boaters when we meet them. So this afternoon I sat down with Pages 09 and designed new boat cards. Once again, the power, yet simplicity, of the Page Layout features of Pages 09 came to the rescue. I still don’t understand why Apple removed all the good features of Pages when they went to the new Pages v5. I have to keep remembering never to update from Pages 09 to Pages v5.

While I had the software out, I decided to make up a flyer, as suggested by the manager at BUT last week. So drawing on work we had done on previous publicity materials, I quickly had a small flyer that we can leave at various locations in the region over the coming weeks. Now to get both the boat cards and the tour flyers off to the printers.

Come evening time, it was still pretty hot, so we decided against cooking on the barge and instead wandered down for a pizza at Le Sunbeam Cafe just before 2100h, hoping they would still be open for food. We were in luck; they had not run out of dough! But they had run out of pineapple, so I had my Pizza Creole (Hawaiian) sans ananas.