We are fortunate that the apartment has good cross-ventilation as well as a fan — it cooled down nicely overnight, although we still didn’t need any covers on us, although I did pull up the quilt cover (like a double sheet) in the early hours of the morning. It was such a pleasure to wake up at 7:30am, having missed Michael sneaking out for his morning run at about 6:30am. The mask from the plane certainly works a treat, preventing any light from getting to my brain too early!

The priority for the morning was to pick up our rental car from near the railway station, about 1.3kms from our apartment. We had booked it for 10am, but read that we had an hour to collect it before the company could rent it out to someone else. We arrived at precisely 6 minutes to 11. The woman handling our booking knew very little English, but luckily a young man who seemed to be doing some on the job training was able to translate for us, my French being a little too rusty to understand what she was saying. The contract was presented to me on a computer screen. Checking it carefully, I noticed an additional charge of about €30 for an extra day. When I queried this, the young man, translating what the older woman was saying, explained that as we had arrived late, we had to pay for an extra day! Michael quickly pointed out that our contract gave us up to an hour to collect the car. The young man asked if we were going to return the car before 10am (in 4 days’ time) — of course we were! The woman immediately backed down. What a cheek! It pays to check contracts very carefully before signing on the dotted line! Michael was very distrusting of the woman, concluding that they were trying to add whatever they could to make up for the fact that we had only paid about AU$150 for the 4 days. He had also booked us a ‘small’ car, but the one provided was much bigger than we’d expected — probably more from the medium size category.

The car was parked just outside the office at the railway station. I sat in the driver’s seat for a while to get my head into gear, as well as the car! It has been a few years since I drove a manual and a few years since I drove on the right-hand side of the road. Once I stopped thinking about which foot to put on the accelerator and which foot to put on the clutch, my brain was able to click over into ‘automatic’. We set up the GPSs (Michael had brought his with him, and the car came with an inbuilt one), and then set off back to the apartment. Talk about stressful! I missed a turn somewhere, and had to go around a huge block a second time. Fortunately, there is a large courtyard in front of our apartment where we can park the car free of charge. We parked the car, and went back inside the apartment. 

After much procrastination (reading and commenting on Facebook), Michael set up his gear and began sketching, complaining frequently about how unattractive the design of the building was. I called Dad on Messenger and had a chat with him and sister, Carina. Strangely, just after finishing the call, neither of us were able to access the internet any more. We disconnected from the network and tried unsuccessfully to sign up for the ‘free’ network (which just took you around in circles), and were then unable to reconnect to the apartment’s network! As Michael needed to access the internet to check out details for the job he was working on, I had to turn on my phone and call Christian for assistance. (I haven’t been using my phone at all, as roaming charges are too expensive, and we rarely need to use the phone anyway.) In terrible French, I managed to let him know that we were having problems connecting to the internet. He seemed to understand and assured me that he would fix it. About 15 minutes later, it still wasn’t working, and Michael was getting more and more agitated. I called again, and managed to find the French words to let Christian know that my husband needed the internet for his work. Within 5 minutes, he was outside our door on a ladder resetting the modem. We were back in business!

Late in the afternoon, we received a message from our friends, Lynette & James, who live in England — we met them in November 2011 at a lodge in the Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand. We have caught up with them a few times in the south of France, and then last year travelled to Wales with them. They had come to Colmar to spend a few days with us. We wandered down in the hot afternoon sun to meet them at their hotel (12 minutes’ walk away), and then escorted them back to our apartment for welcome drinks. We then chose a location to meet up to go out for dinner, and sent them back to their hotel to freshen up for dinner. 

Michael and I set off at about 7:20pm, finding a restaurant on the way that looked promising. As our friends were not yet at the nearby meeting spot, we decided that Michael should go back to the restaurant and procure us a table, given that the restaurant was fairly full. As the time ticked by, I realised that I should have checked my messages just before we left the apartment — had I done so, I would have read the message from Lynette explaining that they had become lost on their way back to their hotel, and so were now running quite late. They hadn’t arrived back at their hotel until about the time we were leaving our apartment! (Colmar is full of twists and turns, and so it’s not difficult to get disoriented!) At about 7:45, I dashed up to the restaurant to let Michael know that they had still not arrived. They eventually turned up at 8:10. We enjoyed a lovely meal at the outdoor restaurant and then headed home for bed.