Bonjour dear readers - at last we are on our way! We have been sitting in St.Jean de Losne for over a week now, waiting to get our boiler fixed (no hot showers - Crew not best pleased!). And no heating for the chillier nights on board. I won't bore you with the details but having been over to the office every day to ask if there was any chance of an engineer coming any time soon we finally nailed him yesterday morning.....,needless to say it took only ten minutes or so for him to fix it!! Then, in order to keep up our reputation we ordered a drinks fridge to be installed on the back deck, which was supposed to be ready last Friday but arrived yesterday afternoon. So a busy day with engineers crawling all over the boat! The fridge is quite a complicated affair as it is enclosed in a teak box for stability and insulation. The design turned out to be much bigger than expected as a pull out unit was at the side of the box for glass storage and a fold down seat on top for the navigator which makes it a bit of a squeeze to access (salads only for Crew from now on!). Now it was just a matter of an electrician to connect the fridge which he did this morning, whereupon Skip went off in the car to buy wine and beer in bulk to furnish our new fridge. All shipshape and ready to go at 10.35 - au revoir St. Jean de Losne!! At the first ascending lock onto the Canal du Rhine au Rhin we collected a 'zapper' to operate the locks - easy to use and normally failsafe (fingers crossed).......and no lunchtime stoppages!!! We had a problem at our last lock with the zapper - it seemed it had not been delivered
fully charged. So we had to unplug our new fridge in order to charge it.......a bit of a dilemma now as we will have to charge the zapper each day which meant turning off the fridge! We decided to charge up first thing in the mornings as it's cooler then. We arrived in Dole at 3.30 - hot, tired and hungry so we sorted out the boat and had a very late lunch. We have visited Dole several times before - it's one of Crews' favourite towns......it is the birthplace of Louis Pasteur and its' narrow streets are lined with lovely old buildings. Some of the streets are very steep with strategically placed handrails to assist the pedestrian in the climb! All I can say it that the citizens of this fair town must have very strong thigh muscles!! We decided to dine out as the town has many restaurants - there are two alongside a little backwater that we know, so we made for those, only to find them both closed! So we wandered around and finally settled on one we had visited before in a little square. As we had such a late lunch we weren't that hungry so settled on just one course of crab cakes which were delicious, washed down with a pichet of very acceptable Chardonnay! We ambled back to Aphrodite just after 10 p.m. and watched a DVD as we seemed to have no TV reception. A successful first cruise of the season!
23 km 9 locks. 5 hours
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