A week ago I booked our train tickets to Bristol using Trainline, out of curiosity I also searched for a journey from Montpellier to Narbonne and was amazed to find I could also buy those tickets on the same site. For the UK journey you are given a reference number which you type into the ticket machine at the station which then prints your tickets. That's the theory, as I was passing a station the day before we left I tried to get my tickets – the system was down. On the day of travel neither the man in Ludlow or Newport station ticket offices could print tickets, they just gave me a slip of paper which I could show to the guard saying it was not my fault and giving free passage.
No such issues with French Railways, my printout from Trainline was the ticket, we were allocated seats on the train which had much more leg room than the UK trains, the station displays were, once we understood the system, very good so you knew where to stand for your carriage and within the train TV screens showed you, in both French and English, how far to go to your destination rather than a bland “the next stop is”. Why can't we do this in Britain?
We are now on our canal boat (Olonzac), pictured at the top of the page, the layout seemed very familiar, we mentioned to Emily the lady who “showed us the ropes” that we had hired a boat last October from Napton Marina and she said “that's my dads yard, he built this boat” - a very small world and almost an identical boat. There is one big difference, in the UK all the water from the toilet goes into a tank which needs pumping out every week or so, here in France it goes straight into the canal so it is not a good idea to fall in or go for a swim. Like all good mariners we had prepared for scurvy by bringing lots of fruit but we were not prepared for cholera!
On the first afternoon we motored about 5km to a village called Ventenac where we had an excellent dinner in a canal side restaurant, the only snag was it only had a few tables under cover and the heavens opened with a serious thunderstorm.
In my preamble I said we had chosen the Canal du Midi on account of continuous sunshine, well the next day (Saturday) we had continuous rain, it was just like boating in England. We did motor up the canal stopping at a few villages in the vain hope it would stop raining but to no avail.