Lindsay's take 2

Sun 25ht May
Arrived in Auxerre around midday and glory be facilities and best of all Internet !
As the weather was still inclement, I spent the afternoon catching up on my emails and drying the boat out.
Auxerre looks a very interesting place, very old with three magnificent churches - one of which was in fact a cathedral.
Both of us were knackered so decided to do sightseeing tomorrow. We met a lovely couple Charles and Joyce both in their 70 + who lived in Paris on their barge for the past 10 years and ventured out to the canals during the summer months. They kindly invited us for evening drinks on their boat so a pleasant evening was spent.

Mon 26th May
Discovered it was a GB bank holiday when Dave was puzzled that nobody was in at work, It doesn’t take long to forget such things!
As the rain had let up mid - morning we risked it and walked into Auxerre town visited the three churches, lots of towering ceilings and beautiful stain glass windows in that wonderful blue that one doesn’t seem to see in English churches. Auxerre is a town within a town with the old part full of original 16 C buildings still used and winding cobbled streets absolutely wonderful, gave one very much a sense of history.
As I had discovered a hypermarket on my travels to find bread we wanted to stock up as we had heard that on the Nivernais canal there weren’t a lot of shops catering for the boat traffic and having been caught out previously we wanted to make sure. Dave was still looking for a child's fishing rod to place at the bow as an early warning for low bridges and had been informed of a fishing shop the other side of town. We went back to the boat so he could dig out his bike only to come across a hired pleasure motor boat trying to maneuver into the place next to us. It was rather obvious that they had little experience of handling such a craft and backed into poor old Rosa leaving a rather nasty scrape across her prow. The boaters were some Aussie old age pensioners on a 2 month trip incorporating France, England and Ireland, damage was looked at and the insurance forms produced, not a good start to our venture! Dave was remarkably calm about the whole thing but I was cross that no one had given these poor souls any instruction on how to operate their craft, They plan to head in the same direction as us tomorrow but I think we will give them a wide berth!
After all that excitement we finally went off shopping a low and behold, the hypermarket had a fishing rod and more importantly cheap, Dave was a happy man!!
Back to the boat loaded up and quick clear up as Charles and Joyce were joining us on a return visit. Nice evening

Tues 27th May
Still raining !!! we had planned to visit open market early then stiff upper lip wrap up in waterproofs, brave the weather and make our way up river, after looking at the rain still throwing down our stiff upper lip disappeared and having reviewed the situation make the decision to wait until after lunch, Used the capetainaire’s facilities and caught up with the washing at vast expense, waited until 14.00 to collect my stuff from the dryer only to discover that the power had been switched off while the staff had gone to lunch- washing still wet, temper aroused! They at least gave me my money back but even now we have various items of clothing draped over most of the boat.
Braved the weather at last and moved off down the canal. The locks here are manual and it is expected that one helps. My nightmare comes true but actually it isn’t too bad, the lockeeper winds with a handle one side of the lock and one of us does the other. We went through several locks with a pleasure boat full of Swiss and after several episodes of us jumping out and helping and they just stood and watched we explained the error of their ways. They were under the impression it was the lockeepers job to do it “oh no we said, it is yours to help” we also noticed that not once did they say thank you to the lockeeper !
After a while the rain went and the sun came out and we could appreciate the canal itself quite narrow in places, very low bridges and no room for error in the locks.
We looked around for a mooring spot and came across Bailley, they produce some form of local champagne here part of the process is to keep them in caves so as it is very close to the river we plan to visit the site tomorrow