Welcome to our weekly updates!

I hope you will enjoy reading about the rather unusual lifestyle that we are currently living. With lots of highs & lows to manage basically on our own in a foreign country with a very different culture, of course, the language being at the top of the list to try and navigate our way around.

Wow, the big count down is on twenty-six days "all going well" till Kiri Maia2 comes out of the factory and is delivered to the yard in Les Sables. Then a further fourteen days till hand over, fourth of March being the magic date that we will be able to move onto Kiri.

By writing every day I hope to capture some of the ups and downs of our life here in France for both Marcel & myself while waiting for delivery of Kiri Maia2, fitting her out, and finally setting sail.

22.1.22 Saturday, we are home

Arriving in Les Sables after a six-hour drive from Roanne and parking the van under our apartment was incredible, we had driven all the way to Greece and back 5,073km plus roughly 500km both ways on the ferry. Twenty-one days on the road meeting so many friendly fun people and visiting some great places along the way. Best of all we had only had a few minor hiccups to deal with.

It's really is good to be home

Marcel had led me to believe that today would be a day of rest I should have realized this didn't mean I could spend the entire morning in bed reading my book, defiantly not on Marcel's radar. After a cold foggy day yesterday, we felt very blessed that today the sun shone all day with a little breeze to assist the drying of the washing out on the veranda. While I attended to the washing and a general tidying up Marcel started researching storage units for our gear it looked promising with four companies based in Les Sables.

The best news of the day was our ship's papers had finally arrived at the hotel it only took two months for them to get here from Auckland.

"Sailing Atlantic Services" saves the day

We woke to another lovely sunny cold day. I spent the morning working on the computer very quietly while Marcel desperately tried to find a storage unit, by emailing and phoning the companies. It all proved to be too hard the langue issue being a big problem, the solution was to combine our daily walk with a visit to Corrine she tried to help to no avail. It seemed all the units were full or we weren't able to pay as we don’t have a Euro bank account. Time for plan b, ask Jean at SAS, the company that is commissioning Kiri Maia2 if he could help us, it was such a relief to be told we could store our gear in the SAS storeroom. By this time it was too late in the day to pack everything onto pallets and wrap it up so that it could be stored. At this stage, it was a good thing Jean didn't realize how much gear we actually have.

Les Sables COVID update, it was a bit of a wake-up call to find out that three out of four organizations that we deal with have staff off with COVID. While traveling to Greece it appears that Covid was wreaking havoc in Les Sables. Fortunately, it seems most people have very mild symptoms & are not off work for long.

Loading pallets in extreme frost is not my idea of fun!

Tuesday: Dawned very cold thick ice on our windscreen. Stacking and wrapping five pallets of gear in the shade on such a cold morning proved to be a finger & toe freezing morning. Jean helped to set us up then left us to it, we felt he was quite shocked when he came out and saw the five pallets, anyway he recovered quite quickly and said everything looked fine and his team would put them away for us. What we didn't show him was what we still had in the van that would need to be stored in the apartment. So close but so far away from our gear, a job well done and it was a huge relief to have it out of the van and hopefully stored away safely.
Arriving back at the apartment I defiantly needed a hot drink to warm up then it was time to bring all the bits and pieces that hadn't fitted on the pallets up to the apartment. It is nice to have some of our own things around us again.

Today in the news Athens & Istanbul have been hit by major snowstorms so I guess a bit of thick ice is nothing to complain about.