We are back in France and - finally - on the verge of starting the Mike-and-Liz-Afloat part of the adventure. But it's been a rocky ride getting to this point.

If you picture the whole shebang as a jigsaw, it looks pretty simple; there are really only a few pieces. One piece involved selling up in NZ and then buying an apartment to rent out, either in the Bay of Plenty or Auckland. The second piece shows a picture of daughter/step-daughter Yasmin happily at boarding school in North Yorkshire at Ripon Grammar (Liz's old school). The third jigsaw piece - a fairly large one - depicts a three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Merseyside, tenanted by a trustworthy professional couple paying their rent on time and providing us with a lowly but steady income for the foreseeable future.

A boat, sufficient to live on, adorns the fourth piece, complete with happy couple (us) holding glasses of wine and waving from the aft deck in warm sunshine within idyllic Femch village in the background.

If all the pieces were together the picture would be complete. Unfortunately, the piece with the NZ apartment is somewhere under the couch, the one with the Merseyside tenanted property has been chewed by a dog, and the Yasmin happily at boarding school is in place but it didn't fit as easily as we'd originally hoped!

Still, here we are on "Boat Takeover Eve" in Reims, the capital of Champagne, and tomorrow we slot the big jigsaw piece into place when we return to St Jean de Losne and take possession of "Liberty".

We are travelling in our bright red van, a 2007 Ford Transit. It's nothing flash, but yesterday we picked up all our NZ effects from the freight company in north London and filled the van with them. When I say "filled" I mean filled! We had previously dropped off our suitcases at Liz's sister's place, and it was painfully obvious that there wasn't going to be room for them, so last evening we spent six hours opening almost every box and trunk and repacking to try and make room for our cases. We did it - just - but it was a bit like putting a jigsaw together; there's really only one way to do it!

So now the plan is to go to the boat, familiarise ourselves with its foibles, and then park the van with everything that's left in it at Liz's parents' place down south not too far from Grenoble.

In the meantime we have come up with an appropriate French-sounding name for the vehicle: Van Rouge.