Finally, after around seven weeks since leaving New Zealand, Liz and Mike are actually abroad together! Liz and daughter Yasmin arrived at her parents' place near St Marcellin, SE France on 2 August while I was still in St Jean de Losne shortl-listing boats.

So I wasted no time and rode the motorbike down south to meet up with them... a lovely reunion... and to hear all about their adventures travelling via Hawaii, San Fran, and New York. But then, two days later Liz and I headed off on the bike back to St J de L to check out boats together (at last!).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we received some bad news from the UK... the house we had put an offer on and which had been accepted - and which we had subsequently had surveyed and started the legal conveyancing on - was suddenly withdrawn from the market by the vendor. Unfortunately that's allowed under UK law, so we lost around NZ $1600, with no recourse to get it back.

On the other hand, having discovered that most of the boats we liked on the Internet were in poor condition, we decided to temporarily flag away the house purchase and instead increase our boat-buying budget. This opened a whole new range of opportunities, and over three days Liz and I kicked the hulls of about eight or nine more craft. On the last morning we finally found what we were looking for... an 11.75 metre Dutch cruiser called Liberty, in lovely condition.

She is nothing like the boat we had imagined buying; we'd always thought we'd be sailing something with charm and character, something old and quirky. Instead we have a canal, river and sea-worthy gin palace (see pic).

After going out on the river Soane for a test drive with Max from the boat brokerage we put in an offer. They rang the owners (in Wales) who accepted it, we signed the contract and paid the deposit. However, having been let down with the house purchase in the UK, we won't be popping any Champangne corks until we have the contract signed by the vendors, but if all goes well we should be Mike-and-Liz-Afloat from around 4 September.