Life on a boat going nowhere

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on October 10th 2025.

Our life tends to be full of experiments. We’re always trying new things, seeing what works and what doesn’t. Sitting on our boat in a marina and not going anywhere is a new experience for us but for the month of October that is exactly what we will be doing.

We cut our cruising season short this year, leaving Olivia Rose in Valence early July and retreating to Le Shack, driven away by the relentless heat, a trend that seems likely to become the norm rather than the exception. But we still want to be on our boat, and so our new plan is to spend time on her outside of the summer cruising months when the weather is kinder.  We’ll use her more as a floating holiday home, a base from which to explore an area in greater depth than is possible once we’ve got the bit between our teeth and are always looking to move on.

Valence claims to have 16 parks, lots of green spaces for a city, and luckily for us their flagship park, Parc Jouvet, is just half an hour’s walk away. I spent a morning wandering through it and thought you might like to join me.

We’ve been here a week now and it has taken a few days to settle but this feels like a good idea. When we’re traveling the focus tends to be on where we’re going. When we stay put the focus is on where we are now. We watch the kingfisher on his regular flight from one bank to the other, and reacquaint ourselves with the the family of swans that were here in July, all grown up now.

We’re not the only liveaboards here, but people tend to keep to themselves more than we are used to. As far as we can tell we are the only British people actually living in the marina at the moment, although there are a few British boats all shut up for the winter. As we walk along the river, few people smile and say ‘Bonjour’. Back at Le Shack everyone says hello to everyone else in passing at least once! Perhaps it’s a city location as compared to a rural one, perhaps a regional difference. Whatever the reason I’ve decided I don’t approve of this behaviour and am saying hello to everyone as a matter of principle.

And that’s it for this week. We’ve got lots of exciting excursions planned for the next few weeks so see you again soon.

MJ