After a final breakfast with Mutti, and a few games of Yahtzee and Liar’s Poker, we grabbed a taxi in late morning to Bern station, for our train to Geneva as the first leg of our trip to Moissac. This was my first train trip to Geneva, since I normally go to Zurich Airport, but I was ready with my iPhone when we reached Lake Geneva and started skirting across the top on the hillside above the vineyards. They use every available space, right up to the edge of the rail line.

After going into the main Geneva station, we then continued onto the Geneva Airport station. I must admit I was expecting a somewhat more grand affair, but it was a long walk (with baggage) through a shopping arcade, then an outdoor parking area before reaching the airport building, which itself was not all that grand, especially for a city as rich as Geneva.

We joined the EasyJet queue for check-in and got to the departure gate a few minutes after their specified 30 minute cutoff time. But we needn’t have worried as they were pretty disorganised with the boarding procedures, and we finally departed about 15 minutes late. A highlight of the flight was when they gave the safety instructions, and Rita and I pissed ourselves laughing when they told us to fasten our seatbelts “ashern” (Taggerty friends will understand this one!). The other passengers wondered what the hell we both found so funny.

When we got to Toulouse we joined the end of four 100-metre queues for passport control (with no special queues for EU or Schengen passports, since I suspect that applied to most people in the queue).

Half an hour later we got to baggage control, where our bags were wondering where the hell we had got to. As we emerged from the Arrivals area, we were met by Veronique, who had kindly agreed to pick us up from the airport and take us to Moissac. Despite the heavy peak hour traffic in Toulouse, Rita and Vero had a good hour catching up on comings and goings and soon we were in Moissac, headed for our storage garage where the car had been hibernating over winter. Luckily I remembered to bring the keys for the garage and the car, and we were soon inside. But while the car was showing some signs of life, it did not have enough battery charge to start the engine. So Vero made a few phone calls and then made a quick dash to pick up some jumper cables from a friend. When she returned, we realised that we would need to push the Scenic out of the garage (it was parked nose in) in order for the cables to reach from her car to ours. But try as we might, the car would not budge. It was at this point that we realised we were in a Catch-22. The car would not move because the “handbrake" was on. But in the Scenic, the “handbrake” is actually an electronic handbrake, which couldn’t be released, because the battery was flat!

So we locked the garage again, and resolved to worry about it tomorrow. Then Vero drove us to the barge where we unloaded our baggage, then headed into town to shout her dinner at La Paris (the old “au Bureau”). Rita and I then went to a free concert as part of the Festival of the Voice (while Vero went home to pack for a weekend hiking in the Pyrenees), after which we walked through town back to the barge. Since we had not yet got a new mattress for our bed, we slept on the pullout couch in the salon, but still got a good night's sleep.