he good news (for this blog) is that today is the last day of my lost photos. From August 11 onwards, we’re back to the usual quantity and quality of photos to illustrate each day, with just one photo and video today.

In the morning, Rita took her bicycle to Lac Damazan to do some swimming before we left the town in the early afternoon. Along our trip today though the corridor of plane trees, we realised again the bliss of barging on a canal, as we cruised along near Le Mas d’Argenais.

As we moved along, we encountered two hotel barges that we have often seen on the Garonne Canal, Rosa and St Louis. As we followed along behind St Louis on a twisty section of canal, we discovered that although these barges are large and powerful, they are not very fast because they need to be very careful when negotiating tight turns to avoid drifting to the outside of the bends. So, we were grateful when the skipper of St Louis slowed down even more and signalled for us to overtake him. It also gave me an opportunity to get a very nice shot of a beautiful barge.

We arrived in Forques-sur-Garonne at 1830h, and pulled into a lovely free mooring just on the edge of town. We later saw St Louis pull in a bit further upstream, and learnt that they used to moor in the spot we were now in, but had vacated it in favour of their new mooring this year. Lucky us!

We had dinner on board and then went for an evening walk through the small town, and then back past St Louis and up into the hills on the south side of the canal. A lovely way to finish the day.