On the morning of 20 August, I drove Rita to Toulouse Airport, where she took a flight to Geneva to spend a week with her parents before flying home from Zurich. I then returned to Moissac, where I spent the next (uneventful) week doing work on the barge and the house, before flying home from Paris. Since nothing really exciting happened in that week, I have condensed it all into one page.

I had been intending to re-paint the cabin deck again (last done in August 2012), but as I began to make preparations for painting, I realised that there was lots of other work to do on the barge (in addition, it was either too hot during the day for painting, or it was raining!). The main task was to ensure that the wheelhouse was waterproofed for the coming winter. All the woodwork needed re-varnishing, while the seals around all the windows needed to be re-done. This involved stripping out all the old silicone sealing that was (poorly) done many years ago, and then re-sealing with clear silicone.

All the ceilings inside the barge also needed a complete cleaning. Several years of accumulated cooking steam and grease needed to be removed.

The work at the house involved a general cleaning and storing things away for the winter, out of the way for the remaining work to be done. Luckily, we still have the storage shed at the edge of town, so several items, including the car, could be stored there. A day was spent photographing at the house to prepare a dossier of all the work remaining to be done by others before next year.

Finally, it came time to pack my bags, catch the train to Paris (where I stayed overnight at the very interesting citizenM Hotel), then fly to Singapore where I met up with Rita who had flown in from Zurich. We then caught the same flight to Melbourne, where we were met by good friend Doug Walter who drove us back to Taggerty. Arriving home about 11pm was a good time to go straight to bed.

But it wasn’t until about 4am the next morning that I fully realised we were home, when we heard our familiar friends: