Springing into Action - Buzet sur Baise

Spring flowers - Damazan market

Welcome aboard for 2016.
April is usually a little early to begin the cruising season but l'Avenir is in the south of France now. Spring arrives earlier there doesn't it?
Winter was definitely- and depressingly- still in force on our arrival in Paris a week ago - 6 degrees and pouring rain. There was also a general strike underway which may have had some bearing on the glacial pace of the baggage reclaim - each revolution of the carousel contained about 3 new pieces of luggage. Fortunately, we'd booked a night in an airport hotel and so after waiting for a couple of hours for our bags we didn't then need to contend with a strikebound transport system.
Everyone was back to work the following morning and we caught an early TGV from the airport arriving in Bordeaux by lunchtime. Our journey, which began in a fog shrouded landscape of bare trees and dried brown grass, gradually softened and took on a hint of colour as we travelled south; the sky becoming blue and the grass and shrubs showing a slight haze of green. Watching the trees turn progressively greener each day since we arrived has been a delightful and uplifting experience.
Our port at Buzet is a little out of the way requiring us to catch another local train and then a taxi. First test for my French this year was phoning for the taxi which I did whilst waiting for our next   train in Bordeaux. The call went to message bank so I was quietly relieved (and, to be honest, a bit surprised) to see a taxi actually turn up to meet us when we got off the train.
L'Avenir wasn't where we had left her 5 months ago. At the end of December the VNF (the waterways authority) drained the canal for a couple of months in order to carry out maintenance. The decision to undertake the work came as an unwelcome surprise to everyone with boats in the port and necessitated quite a bit of work for a few people moving boats around and away from the quay so they could settle flat on the muddy bottom of the canal. We, of course, were on the other side of the world and unable to help so are very grateful to those people who looked out for our boat.
The past week has been spent scrubbing and scouring and generally getting everything shipshape. This has not gone entirely to plan however, and we've already had our first (and hopefully last) 'unfortunate incident'...

Welcome to Buzet - and this year's travels