Saint-Florentin

There has been trains, planes and automobiles ... and now we're adding 'canal boat' as a holiday mode of transport. We had a bit of a kerfuffle getting to the port this morning. We were originally meeting the boat at Tonnerre but a minor problem with the boat meant we had to meet it at Saint Florentin instead. The boat company sent us a timetable yesterday for the local bus which would get us to our new starting point.

Changing our transport plans should have been as easy as catching a different bus but no such luck. Apparently the bus simply doesn't run if no one contacts the bus company by 5.00pm the previous afternoon to advise that they want to catch it ... and we discovered this well after 5.00pm yesterday.

Thinking that surely someone, somewhere must want to catch a bus hence the bus would be running today, we asked the hotel reception to ring the bus company this morning to check if the driver was intending to get out of bed. She confirmed that the bus existed and would be at the identified stop at the appropriate time. We were there well in advance of said time and we were still there over an hour later. Perhaps the message to pick up passengers was lost in translation but there's only one bus opportunity each day and today wasn't our lucky day. We rang the boat company to share our plight with them and they very helpfully arranged for a private car to collect us from the bus stop.

It started raining just as we stepped out of the car at the port and there was no immediate sign of our boat. A very friendly couple from the UK invited us all to join them for a cup of tea on their boat to wait out the rain or until our boat materialised, whichever happened first. As luck would have it, the two coincided and before long we were getting our 10 minute lesson in diesel motors, generators, boat steering, lock navigation and rope tying.

The explanations were in Franglish so at the end we knew about as much as we did at the beginning ... and then we were let loose on our own for the next 5 days. Hope nothing gets in our way, we don't really know how to steer and there's no hand brake.Read more