First chance to get back to the blog and so much has happened but first back to Friday in Mountauban. A beautiful breakfast in the hotel before off o explore the old town but first we went through the joys of finding a doctor for Margaret\u2019s ear problems as they had not been comfortable since the flight over. Decided the channel was blocked up from the nose and some nose drops sorted that. We spent the day just strolling around the city, coffee in the square and a wander up to see our boat.\u00a0 All very exciting.\u00a0 The logistics of getting us, our gear and our shopping to the boat the next day took the biggest effort.\u00a0 We had dinner under the stars back in the square that night, wonderful ambience and strolled back to the hotel for an early night as we were all tired.<\/p>\n
Saturday \u2013 go to the market, great fun shopping, veggies, cheese, meat coffee.\u00a0 Lots to taste and all very nice and yummy.\u00a0 Back to the hotel for a 11 o\u2019clock pick up.\u00a0 Drop the girls at the supermarket while the boys went on and set up the boat.\u00a0 The girls got locals excited as they loaded up with beer, wine and water.\u00a0 All looking good for an early departure when some bloody idiot slices his forefinger left hand.\u00a0 Blood everywhere, a very deep slice.\u00a0 We look for a doctor to stitch up as we think it might be quicker than the hospital but in the end decide on hospital. \u00a0Dennis the base manager ran us in and got us started in the system. A bit of a noise about not being French and not having a European Card but we offered to pay and showed them our New Zealand passport they seemed happy. \u00a0Our chances of being off tonight are looking slim.\u00a0 When the doctor finally gets around to putting the stitches in he says opps we have a problem.\u00a0 Tendons have been severed and surgery is required.\u00a0 He whips the tourniquet off and takes off.\u00a0 Blood starts pouring out and I have to bunch up the sheet to stop getting covered in it.\u00a0 When he comes back there is quite a pool of it.\u00a0 He has arranged an appointment with the surgeon for 9am the next morning for what should only take 3 hours.\u00a0 He throws in 3 stitches to hold it together and sends me on my way with a prescription for antibiotics and pain killers.\u00a0 I\u2019m not very happy as you can expect.\u00a0 All the pharmacies are shut.\u00a0 After walking to three we decide to order a taxi from someone that only speaks French.\u00a0 We wait and we wait and have to ring a second time to get someone to arrive.\u00a0 We manage to find a Pharmacy and head back to the boat to tell Dave & Jan the bad news.\u00a0 By the time we got back Jan had cooked a beautiful pasta, yummy yum.<\/p>\n
Sunday \u2013 And we are at the hospital before the allotted hour.\u00a0 I get shown to a room and after fifty questions from four gorgeous nurses get to put on a gown and hop into a bed.\u00a0 \u00a0I get to read a heap of my kindle before being wheeled off to surgery at about 12.30.\u00a0 I had had a visit from an Anaesthetist telling me he was going to deaden my whole arm but that got downgraded by the surgeon to just my finger. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I got really looked after and it was a lot of fun with the language problems. Ask me sometime about the sign (or maybe body) language to ask me if I had had a number one or two.\u00a0 I ended up under a blue plastic sheet so did not see what was done and came out with two fingers strapped to a metal plate running down my arm and being told to keep it there for three weeks, bloody great as it almost made that arm almost useless.\u00a0 Glenda if you are reading this please put me down for three week sick leave from Saturday 6th<\/sup>. \u00a0\u00a0We got back to Port Canal about 5pm to another great tea from Jan.\u00a0 I am going to keep her on, pork loin steaks with veggies, another yummy yum yum.<\/p>\n Monday \u2013We have had two nights on the boat and gone no where.\u00a0 Jan and Dave are very understanding and probably going a bit stir crazy but today we are finally going to be on our way.\u00a0 Dennis is going to accompany us through the first lock.\u00a0 I have been given the role of Captain, you would think they would know better wouldn\u2019t you after my effort so far.\u00a0 Well I was soon going to learn that that driving a Mystique was like driving the Queen Mary.\u00a0 You had to make the move five minutes before you wanted it to happen, loads of fun and we almost took out the pontoon on our first practise at berthing.\u00a0 But as often happens we could only get better from there.\u00a0 We were shown through our first lock and wished good luck.<\/p>\n Typing is very slow with just one hand so thought I had better get this up while I could and had internet.\u00a0 We are in Buzet at the moment at a Restaurant and it is a rainy Thursday night. .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First chance to get back to the blog and so much has happened but first back to Friday in Mountauban. A beautiful breakfast in the hotel before off o explore the old town but first we went through the joys of finding a doctor for Margaret\u2019s ear problems as they had not been comfortable since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}