Friday 8 August - thunderstorm, workers lunch, Bernard, evening storm

The day began with an early morning thunderstorm, which continued through most of the morning. Around mid-morning a siren sounded, and continued to sound on and off for about an hour. We never did find out what it was meant to be signifying.

We have been here for a month now, and the barge has moved precisely zero kilometres. Now I know what it feels like to be a live-aboard canal resident.

At lunchtime, we went up to the house to have lunch with some of the guys who had been working on the house over the past year. It was great to be able to say thank you personally to them.

One of the photos was a statistical rarity - how many times can you take a photo of three people (Vincent, Frederique and Jean-Baptiste) and only get one eye open?

In the afternoon, Rita went down to Moissac Plage on the Tarn to help Veronique with a music workshop that she was offering for the kids at the plage.

That evening we went up in the hills behind Moissac to have dinner at Bernard’s house. A very relaxed evening with food, wine and music, capped off by a spectacular storm that rolled over the hillside.  It produced some amazing scenes as it mixed with the setting sun, depending on which direction you looked.

Looking at the rain radar later we saw that the storm was actually rolling across nearly all of France that night. It produced an amazing sunset in Moissac Port (photo by Kaz Noble).