Wednesday 17th September 2014 Bogny-sur-Meuse. Day off to get all our communications stuff sorted in Charleville.

The 4 sons of Aymon rocks above Bogny

11.2°C Hot and sunny. After breakfast Mike unloaded the bike and we stowed it back on the roof, just as the cruiser Blue Steel was leaving, going the same way as us but heading ultimately to Paris. The lady in charge of moorings today came to see if we wanted to fill up our water tank, Mike said no thanks, we were OK and we were staying today and would fill up later this evening. We went into Charleville-Mézièrs by car to find the Bouygues phone shop. Parked by the port de plaisance and walked over the footbridge into the city centre. Took our place in queue and eventually spoke to a young

Moored on the pontoon with Bogny on the far bank

lady who went through all the bits and pieces necessary for getting a contract. Disaster! We hadn’t brought our Post Office chequebook with us and they needed a cancelled cheque as well as an RIB (proof of identity slips that are included in each chequebook). We did the shopping at Carrefour, bought a phone SIM for SFR Red for 4,99€ a month for the phone, then went home to unload and get some lunch. Back to Charleville. Another queue. It’s Wednesday and schools are closed in the afternoon so the place was much busier than the morning. Waited a short while in a queue then spoke to a young man who passed us on to his colleague, another young lady, and she did all the paperwork. Another thing we were

Moored at Bogny, looking upriver

short of was a justicatif, in other words proof of living in Condé (usually a utility bill, but we’d explained that we don’t have them as we live on a boat). Promised to e-mail our certificate when we got home. Paid 1€ for a little mobile 4G router as we’d taken out a one year contract for 16 gigabytes per month for 24,90€. It says you can connect up to ten items at a time, such as laptops, PCs, smart phones and tablets. That means we can both use the Internet at the same time. Whoopee. All we need now is a good signal and that might be difficult in the lovely Meuse valley. We’ll see later. The lady in charge of moorings was late - it was after seven – and it was a third lady (not had the same one twice) who attached the adaptor on the water tap so Mike could refill the tank while she did the paperwork and charged us another 5,90€. He told her we’d be leaving in the morning. After dinner we set to work getting all the new French systems up and running. The router worked well. I replied to e-mails, sent the justificatif to Bouygues, and then registered the new SFR SIM online. 4,99€ a month for a minimal amount of talk time in France (two hours a month) plus unlimited texts, etc. They’ll send a number for the phone and activate it within 48 hours (couldn’t you just guess that SFR is the nationalised phone company of France?) Mike went online to do banking, etc, (Bouygues is a private enterprise, their stuff works straight away). Nice to be reconnected!