The day started fairly early for me with an 0800h Zoom meeting with Sebastian Klein back home in Victoria, talking about various farm forestry issues. One doesn't have to miss out on what's going on back home just because you're on the other side of the world.

The rest of the morning was spent doing various cleanup jobs on the boat, given the arrival of our guests this evening. I guess it would be fair to say that Kanumbra is a "lived-in" boat rather than a "showcase" boat, like many other Piper barges. Indeed whenever we venture onto other Piper barges, I don't know where they put all their "stuff". Everything is so spick-and-span (which I didn't realise had a nautical origin, until I was just checking the spelling online!); we would rather enjoy our boat and worry about what it looks like later. But everyone has their limits, and today we thought it was about time for a good cleanup (or at least as good as we could manage).

As I was busy doing some jobs in the wheelhouse, I heard a "G'day Mate" from the path alongside the mooring. I looked outside to see someone I didn't know, but he said "I saw your flag, then I saw your leg through the door, so I thought I'd say hello". And thus I met Rob, a town planner from Queensland who is on his boat Vintage Cru in the other Besançon port with his wife Anna. We chatted for a while and when Rita heard that Anna was a psychologist, she popped her head up and joined the conversation. I suspect Rita and Anna will have some separate chats later, given their common interests in therapy.

In the early afternoon, I heard a familar "clip-clop" sound and looked outside to see a horse-drawn garbage cart trotting along the path in front of the Conservatorium. I saw one of these at the same place in 2019, and am glad that the tradition has continued.

Later in the day, I heard the sound of another audience gathering in the forecourt of the Conservatorium, and went up to investigate. This time it was a wind orchestra getting ready to play. As we are approaching the end of term, I suspect that many of the music groups at the Conservatorium are taking the opportunity to do a performance as part of the Summer Solstice music weekend in Besancon. Like yesterday, as this snippet shows, it was another good performance.

As storm clouds gathered again over Besançon in the late afternoon, we walked over to where we had left the car parked yesterday near the VNF pontoon, so that we could drive out to the Besançon TGV station, about 30 minutes north of the city, to pick up Arnim and Heidi, our guests for the next few days. Halfway there, the heavens opened with a deluge. When we got to the station, we found that their train from Strasbourg was running 30 minutes late, so we had time for a relaxed coffee. Eventually their train arrived, and it was not too difficult to spot Arnim, apart from the sling he had on his right arm after his recent shoulder surgery, after a fall on black ice in Ithaca last year. The chat started as soon as we met and contunued in earnest on the drive back to the port. After unloading luggage from the car at the port, Arnim accompanied me as I drove the car across the river to a long-term parking spot near La Rodia concert hall. After walking back over the pedestrain bridge we settled down on the rear-deck for some welcome drinks and then dinner. The chatting continued for a long time into the night, because we hadn't seen each other for 20 years after we dropped into Ithaca on our way to Quebec in 2003. We were in a good mood well before the end of the night.