'Don't forget to wave to the fish!' Sarah said with a smile as we left her bed & breakfast place. Wave to the fish? Oh right - a joke! Ha, of course; we would be taking our van underwater to cross to France, so naturally one would want to wave to the fish. But we needed some light relief. After leaving Liverpool, where we'd spent two weeks trying to furnish our new apartment (with only minor success) we'd only just survived an eight-hour drive to Folkestone....

It had to happen to one of us sooner or later; one of us had to fall in the drink. We were even prepared for the occasion, and have a little silver trophy on board which we've been saving to award to the first person to go overboard. But who would be the inaugural recipient? Liz or me? The first of us to voluntarily 'leave the boat' was me, but that was back in July when we were moored on the Yonne river at a place called Cezy. The weather was beautiful, the ri...

On Sunday 16 August, war was declared between Germany and Britain. What? You think we got the date wrong? No, this is World War III, and it started in the small French inland port at Montereau, about an hour south of Paris by train. We were witnesses. We were there When. It. Happened. You heard it here first. This time though, there was no assassination of an Archduke, and no Invasion of Poland. If anything, it could be argued that it was Britain that needed the...

We carried on through the verdant Burgundy landscape to Mailly-la-Ville for a lunch stop, then on to the mooring at Bailly, arriving late afternoon in very warm weather. The mooring was great, with free power and water, and, even better, we were the only boat there. Even better than that was the nearby wine cave of Bailly Lapierre. We thought we might be too late to go wine tasting, but as it happened they were open till 7pm, so we strolled the short distance up...

After enjoying the live music and the general atmosphere of Auxerre, we continued on south in Liberty, but knew we wouldn't be able to go any further on the Canal du Nivernais than a place called Clamecy. The Englishman who runs the port office at Auxerre had warned us that our boat's draught would be too deep for the canal waters beyond That point, and said that even some of the hire boats he rented out with one-metre draughts had been scraping the canal bottom...