We spent the night on the boat at Migennes and the following morning caught a taxi to Auxerre where we picked up a hire car. It took us about 30 minutes to drive there – only 28 days previously it took us a full day to do this trip!
We then drove through to Beaune and visited some wine shops and the fabulous Hospice there. We spent the night in Beaune and the next morning drove into the winelands – acres and acres of vineyards! After this and a very quick wine tasting we were off to spend the day and night with Bill at his old 17th c farmhouse near Macon.
My diary has been a short daily account of this trip – I certainly would not have remembered all the places we passed or stopped at unless I kept tabs of where we went. It has been fun to type up my hand written notes nearly 2 years after the event. Some places I remembered very clearly and others are a bit vague. I have however managed to remeber enough to be able to match photos to the diary so they do actually match the places we visited! Days melted into each other and I managed to keep busy on the boat and was never really bored. But 28 days was enough….. and I was glad when the trip was over and I could return to real life again.
I also kept the diary very impersonal; just a record of my observations. Steve had decided that this trip would be the “acid test” for our relationship; and it was. I only realised a few days before we left that he was in love with someone else and I am sure I was the last person he wanted to be with and he made this know to me. I should not have gone but felt that to decline the trip a few days before we were due to leave was unfair. But there again he should have spoken up a bit sooner as well.
So, there we were. We hardly spoke, other than to ask for tea or say good morning, good night and so on. We spent the days in silence mostly and when we went into the towns and villages I trotted 7 paces behind Steve – so detached were we, we never walked next to each other or rode our bikes together – he was always in front (he didn't see me fall becasue he was so far in front of me) except when we rode back to the boat in the dark – and no I didn’t go back but I did stop to see that he got back on the bike. We could have been total strangers.
After we visited Bill we went on to Geneva for a couple of days and by the time we got on the plane for the UK, I was broken, completely and utterly broken. It took a great deal of will power or whatever to try and mend this relationship as we were to stay with Steve’s brother for 2 weeks and I felt it was not fair to inflict this dreadful atmosphere on the them. I managed, just, but I have never felt so happy as when we landed back in Johannesburg. And we did not last much longer together after this and it has taken me a long time to get over this relationship. The last I heard was that Steve was still seeing the other lady he was so in love with. He should have taken her on this trip but when I asked him why he hadn’t asked her he just said that she would not have managed…..
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