Being Saturday morning, we rose lateish and headed up to the Saturday morning market to buy our fresh produce and have a look around for anything interesting. As always, we kept bumping into people that we knew from previous years.

Around noon we met up with Pete and Vicky who had walked down from the house, and we then adjourned to the Compostelle Cafe for coffee and/or beer.

After this, Rita and I went for a walk around the town to find the house that had been rendered in the same colours as was suggested to us yesterday. Our initial views, below left, were confirmed that it would look rather bland and insipid. However, on the opposite corner, we saw the Mairie building, below right, including the Urbanisme Department who were advising on house colours, and we much preferred something more similar to this (although not quite as dark in the main facade rendering, but with the same darker colour around the windows). We will used these photos when we make our case to them at a later date.

We then returned to Kanumbra to prepare for having lunch on deck. While waiting, Pete and I got talking about the possibility of installing solar panels over the dog-box windows. This would provide trickle charge to keep the house, engine starter, generator starter and bowthruster batteries fully charged. Given Pete’s expertise in the area, it didn’t take too long before he was making sketches for a possible design, and wiring diagrams for the charging system. Pete also just happened to have a multimeter in his pocket, so before long he was under the instrument panel in the wheelhouse checking out the various circuits.

We finally dragged him out from “under the bonnet” and had lunch and then set off for Auvillar, a heritage hilltop village just south of Valence d’Agen. Our first stopping point was the famous circular Grains Market, the centrepiece of the town.

We then wandered through the town and stopped at the town wall to have a look over the Garonne River, the old suspension bridge and the slightly more recent nuclear power station in the distance at Golfech.

As we admired the view, we heard the distant rumbling of an approaching thunder storm. So we headed indoors for a while and visited a local gallery, which featured a DIY sculpture, which Rita had great fun playing with.

Having wandered around the gallery for a while, it was still threatening outside, but the storm had not arrived properly. So we made a run for the car to start driving to Lauzerte where we intended to have dinner. One thing we now keep seeing, after Nico had told us that the Belvedere would have this treatment later in the year, was brick infill between timbers, as shown below in Auvillar (left) and Lauzerte (right).

Because we had arrived too early for dinner, we had a drink in the corner pub at Lauzerte (Nico’s favourite) and then wandered over to the Three Chevalier Restaurant where we had a very pleasant meal. During the evening, I kept trying to check the score on my phone from the Speedway World Cup Final in Vogens, Denmark without any luck. It was only when I got home that I discovered that it was also raining in Denmark and the meeting had been washed out, and rescheduled for Sunday.