Final Days, Sept 19-29

 Now it was time for the final clean up, painting and winterizing.

Sunday it started to rain and continued, heavy at times, for a couple of days, It rained enough to put our sandy beaches on the river underwater and close the crossing of the Loire onto the Canal du Nivernais due to fast current. Luckily, later in the week it cleared up so we could complete our outside chores. 

We also had two replies for winter berths, one from Castelnaudry on the Midi and the other from Castelsarrasin on the Garrone lateral canal so, assuming we can make it south next year we’ll have a place to put the boat for the winter. We would be pretty happy with either place.

Monday the 27th, after a mighty struggle with our car navigation system we returned the car to the airport and, after a struggle finding a taxi, made it to our hotel room. The taxi driver told us that since there’s so little passenger traffic at the international terminal, the taxis have all gone elsewhere. 

Tuesday, Air France got in on the fun. A malfunction of the aircraft required us to change planes after we’d already pushed back from the gate. Our departure was delayed by 5 hours, but luckily our rental car was waiting for us in Los Angeles. We finally made it to our Ventura home about 9 pm, a 24 hour journey.

Here’s a map of this years trip. The colored line are the “out” portion and the place markers are where we stayed on the “back” part. Hopefully next years map will be a little more interesting!

As always, you can expand the map to get a better picture of where we went.

And the numbers-

407 kilometers traveled

118 locks

84 1/2 hours underway on 21 travel days

See you next year!