Who wouldn’t love an excuse to visit Paris in summertime! This time, for us, it was to have dinner with our Californian friends the Campbells, who were spending a few nights in the city.

As I’ve said before, one of the great things about our 15½ years in Singapore is the friends from all over the world that we made there. Among them are Ellie, Steve and their twins Peyton and Prescott (17), long since returned to live Orange County, southern California. It’s been seven years since we visited them there in 2011.

In just under four hours, the high-speed TGV train whisked us from Montauban station (half an hour from our home port, Moissac, in the south of France) to Gare Montparnasse. From there, we hailed a cab to our three-star hotel Chambellan Morgane at 6 Rue Kepler, close to the Champs Élysées. Ten out of ten to them: they upgraded us to their best room, complete with Nespresso machine, bathtub and separate loo. So civilised!

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Bonjour à tous! It’s been eight months since we left our Dutch barge Karanja to see out her first European winter in the port de plaisance of Moissac, in the south of France – and now we’re back on board for the summer.

In case you were wondering, our berth in Moissac is on the opposite side of the canal from the capitainerie, which is presided over by Captain Jim year in and year out.

Family reasons kept me in Durban for a week longer than Roy, who went on ahead. And I’m delighted to say that he made good use of the time to find Lisa, a lovely lady from Essex who did a great job of cleaning both the outside and the inside of the boat before I arrived.

Apart from a build-up of green algae on the decking on the side that gets less of the winter sunshine, and superficial deterioration in the varnish on some of the woodwork, Karanja was in good shape. The intervening eight months had done her no harm. Even the potatoes I’d forgotten to throw out had done nothing more terrible than produce some unusually inventive sprouts – shows how cold it must have been on board!

Playmates

Transitioning from one country to another can take a few days – especially when you’re leaving beloved friends and family members behind. So the arrival of Roy’s sister Lyndsay and her husband John for the weekend was a welcome distraction.

They did the two-hour drive from their house in the Dordogne (click on the link for my September 2017 blog on our weekend there) and booked into hotel Le Moulin, just a five-minute walk from Moissac port de plaisance. Though of course we’re very happy to put up guests on our pull-out sofa bed – or even in the wheelhouse, though that particular option hasn’t yet been tested – there’s no denying that their corner room at Le Moulin was indubitably more comfortable.

They would have been a lot more comfortable, says Lynt, had there not been a spectacularly noisy four-hour deluge complete with thunder and lightning, together with a clump* of geese located t’other side of the river Tarn and honking their beaks off all night. John didn’t hear a thing, it seems. (A couple of litres of local red will do that.)

*collective noun courtesy of Lyndsay

Before that, we had a scratch lunch on board Karanja. That’s so easily done in France, as long as the boulangérie is open. Fresh, crusty bread just needs some butter from Normandie, a simple salad, a couple of cheeses, some olives or cornichons, some sort of dried sausage and last night’s leftover potato salad – et voilà!

Review: Fromage rît

Later, after meeting up for a biére pression on Le Moulin’s terrace with a view of the muddy Tarn, we strolled up the Rue des Arts for dinner at Le Fromage rît. It’s our current favourite of several restaurants in the main square adjoining Moissac’s  magnificent abbey, all with some indoor and a lot more outdoor tables.

Unlike any of the others, Le Fromage rît offers an inspired four course meal (€21) that changes weekly. Its bubbly manager, Julie is the soul of the place; she murders the English language with apparent relish and not a hint of self-consciousness.

This week, it was a choice of two starters: the first based on green lentils, the second a faintly spicy Mexican-style wrap. For mains, it was either brandade morue (baked cod with potato) and toast topped with salmon, or chicken fillet marinated in yoghurt and spices. As usual, an excellent cheese board followed, and finally dessert – a choice of freshly made ice cream, or something based on crème fraiche.

Les hommes managed to get through two litres of a local red, while les femmes restrained themselves to deux pichets de rosé (which sounds a lot better than a litre of the stuff).

Then it was back to Karanja for un petit Cointreau for me and almost another bottle of red for Roy and John. Lyndsay had brought these two bottles of Côte de Bordeaux as a gift for her brother; she couldn’t resist the name: Les Charmes du Roy.

The morning after

So it’s no wonder that we were not the first to arrive at Moissac’s weekend market on Sunday morning, nor that our first stop was for a bracing coffee at the ever-popular Bar de Compostella. Nor that we stuck to Badoit with our salad lunches at Le Kiosque de l’Uvarium. (More on this quaint place later… it deserves a blog to itself.)

As for the market, it’s such a good one that I’m thinking it deserves a blog of its own sometime soon.

For now, let me know if you think Roy should buy a beret from this stand. (I have my reservations, but he does seem quite keen.)

Last bit of Le Canal du Midi, then on to Le Canal de Garonne:

Hot and grumpy in Grisolles, electrical wizardry and magnificent munchies in Montech, chatted up in Castelsarassin, journey’s end in Moissac

It’s a long, long way to Grisolles

Tenderly, I asked my husband: “Do you still like boating?” It was a loaded question.

Under the scorching sun, sweating like a beast, he’d just hammered the second mooring pin into what sounded like concrete under the patchy grass. It would have been 35 degrees in the shade in Grisolles – had there been any shade. And my Roy does not like to be hot.

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