End of an era…..

Many will be aware that we have been planning to sell Piedaleau this year. It is indeed happening! We have french buyers, contract has been agreed and toasted at their bar. So this will be the end of an era for me / us ……

I have been a boat owner since the early 1990s when I met and then married Tom. Since bringing Misty Morning to France in 2009, I have spent a good part of each year on afloat in Europe. During Covid lock down Adrian and I watched quite a few TV programmes about parts of the Uk and realised that we would very much like to visit more there.

So we have decided to sell Piedaleau and buy a motorhome – so that we can tour UK and Europe whilst we are still fit and able to embrace a new challenge. We have lots of baoty type friends who have offered to provide us with a boating fix as and wen we need! How lucky is that!

We have, therefore, been packing up Piedaleau – amazing what you can accumulate in a fairly constrained living machine! Luckily for us (perhaps not quite so for Chris and Helen) Vrouwe Olive is providing transport to the UK for quite a lot of our ‘stuff’! So when we leave towards the end of October we hope to fill the car up one last time and head home to start hunting for our new toy!

On our first trip with stuff to Vrouwe Olive two policemen got out of their car and came to see what was going on! Must have looked a little dodgy – forming a chain to load all sorts of ‘stuff’ into Vrouwe Olive’s hold! I was on the roadside so it was moi who was asked for the boat papers. I quickly explained that it wasn’t my boat – it was Chris’s – he obligingly popped his head up out of the hold to say bonjour! One copper then said, with a very straight face, that he was only joking! I kind of flicked my hand towards his shoulder saying he’d had me worried there for a bit in a similar jovial vein ……. ‘you weren’t going to hit a policeman were you?’ Ooooops!!

Turned out that they were just interested in finding out about the boat and Chris offered for them to look inside. I ended up showing them around, discussing the boat at length, while the others finished loading our goods and chattels and came to find out what on earth I was up to with these two nice young policemen!