By Friday morning, all the exhibits were at hand, except for my canvas-print photo, which had not yet been delivered from The Netherlands. I checked the tracking notice and it said it was due for delivery today, so I remained optimistic. In the meantime, I started hanging the rest, and by 1400h most had been hung, when I heard a van stop outside the front door on Rue Gambetta. I peeked outside and saw it was a GLS van, so I quickly opened the door and waited. The driver was surprised to find someone already waiting when he got out of his cabin. I love Just-In-Time management!

We found out during the afternoon that Donald Bestor had had a little accident on his way from Castersarassin to moor on the River Tarn. As he entered the double-lock to go down to the Tarn at Moissac, he noticed some smoke coming from the engine room. On opening the hatch, he noticed a small patch of flame and tried to pat it out with his hand. Unfortunately, the thing that was burning was a small plastic bucket, and the melted plastic stuck to his hand, causing some severe burns. Eventually, he got everything under control and the fire extinguished, but was not able to re-start the engine, and so had to manually pull Largo back out of the lock, and moor just inside the canal area. He then went to hospital to get his burns treated. Not the best way to start the weekend )-:

Once all the exhibits were hung, I went round with a camera to record everything for posterity. All the Arts Expo exhibits are shown below.

One nice thing about the Arts Expo was the mixture of barging people and local community people who attended (around 60 in total), including a couple from the Moissac Mairie. Hopefully it will be the start of many collaborative exercises over the coming years, since the future of barging in France will depend a lot on gaining local community support. It appeared that everyone was enjoying themselves.

Towards the end of the day we got everyone to gather in the garden for a group shot from the upper floor of the house.

The short video below gives a very summary guided tour to the Arts Expo.

Around 1900h, people started drifting away in the direction of the Sunbeam Cafe, where the Karaoke and Curry night was being held. By 2100h, about 80 barging and local folk had arrived and were enjoying Terry and Sandra Lalley (“Felix Static”) playing music, while Irene and Solange were dishing up the curries. As the night wore on, the music turned to Karaoke, with all the regulars entertaining us with their efforts. One good sign was that when Tony Kelly started the Karaoke session, no one volunteered to sing, since everyone was still too busy talking with whoever happened to be at their table - a good sign that the evening was progressing well.