France part 3

 Sunsets and the beach... sunset was about ten o clock, and most nights we went and watched it from the beach. There were a  couple of rainy nights when we didn't bother - one night  there was a tremendous storm with the whole sky lit up by lightning for the best part of an hour. I was glad we had re-waterproofed the tent last summer. The bird is a bin for rubbish, there was another one shaped like a fish, and one which was modelled on the traditional fishing cabins. 

The bathing huts weren't there for the first few days and I missed them, but then one evening we saw some wooden foundations being put down, and the next morning the huts were there. They were fairly cheap to rent for a week, and would have been great if you were staying further away from your home base than we were. 

France part two

 Talmont-sur-Gironde was founded in 1284 by Edward 1st of England (two years ago we visited a castle in Normandy built by Richard 3rd - one forgets how much of France used to be held by the English. It's a very small town (cited as having 100 occupants), and is totally pedestrianised which made it very pleasant to wander around. A little romanesque church dominates the town, and hollyhocks spring up all over the place. 

France June 24 - part one

 As I said, this was our laziest holiday for a long time. We walked plenty - it was about a 2km (1.25 miles) walk along the beach into town, and we did that most days and twice a couple of days, and I swam most days. But we really only visited a couple of places, a small town about 10 km down the road, and another town where we went on Sunday morning hoping to find a car boot sale. I think it was probably rained off - I checked a couple of websites before we left the campsite, but there was no update and we decided to risk it. What we got instead was a lovely walk upstream along the river into the countryside, and then a walk downstream along the river into the centre of the town. But as it was raining all the time, I only have a couple of photos from there, and none of them made it into my Google album (Charentes Maritime, June 24) . We really enjoyed the fact that all along the length of the river there was a trail with reproductions of paintings by Gaston Balande, who was born in Madrid but grew up in Saujon.  As it pretty much rained all that day, we also went to an exhibition in Royan, an interpretive centre of the architecture and heritage. There was a very informative video - the town must have been beautiful in its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it became popular as a seaside resort. But it was seriously bombed in WW2, destroying over 80% of the buildings, so it is now a very modern and (to our eyes) rather soulless town. There were some very interesting models of some of the classic buildings that survived and some of the major new ones, and a reproduction of a Seventies kitchen and sitting room which we enjoyed. 

So I guess in this post I'll add a couple of  Gaston Balande's paintings and a couple of photos from the interprative centre, and save the rest for two more  posts.  The next post will be the other town we visited - Talmont-sur-Gironde, listed as one of the most beautiful villages in France. It was founded in 1284 by Edward 1st of England - and the rest can wait till later in the week...

Picture trail along the river Seudre, paintings by Gastone Balande. 

Model of Japanese-style house in Royan

All the paraphernalia associated with comfortable camping! We hired a fridge this year, because last year often the only time we needed to go out in the car was to buy ice blocks for my good coolbox. And I must say it was very nice to be relying on either a small portable solar panel or a long drive to keep our phones, camera and Kindle charged. We bought the large black trunk a couple of years ago to make packing the car easier, and it's great on-site for waterproof storage and an extra surface for food prep. New this year was a little CampinGaz grill, which was great not only for burgers and skewered meat, but with the addition of a pizza stone it was excellent for cooking pizzas - widening our options. We bought the stools last year, and they are brilliant because they telescope right down to just a couple of inches high. 

I was going to add a video of a sparrow enjoying a dust-bath, but as I only took it on my phone I don't think it's worth it.  We had a lot of birds on our pitch - both male and female blackbirds, robins (we saw a red squirrel a couple of times too), pigeons galore, and while I only heard an owl a couple of times, the last few nights we could hear a night jar regularly.

Holiday bookends

We are just back from a three week camping holiday in France - finally. It will take time to initially cull and then refine my selection of photos, but the theme seemed to be rivers and gardens. We started with a stopover in the Loire valley to visit Villandry, which we first visited back in '95.

The knot garden in the left foreground is typical hedging, but the nine main squares are all laid out with assorted vegetables supplemented by some bedding.

No gardens as such in the Pyrenees - that was mountains, but rivers everywhere including just across the road from our tent.

Then we moved to the Cevennes - rivers everywhere, including bracketing the campsite. We chose a pitch about half way up the slope to the top of the hill, and felt as if we were camped in our own woodland glade. This was during the heatwave, with a couple of days around the 40C (over 100F) mark, so we were glad to have planned another return visit - this time to the Bambouseraie (bamboo garden). Ideal on a hot sunny day - the only really open space was Dragon Valley.

Here is one of the bamboo alleys. The following photo is, I think, the same alley taken a few days later from the steam train trip we took. The bamboos are tall when you are under them, but the giant redwoods tower over them. And I think that if you didn't know that they were bamboos, one would think that all the foliage in that photo was just regular trees.

We had a single night stopover in the Auvergne, alongside yet another river. This was the day of torrential storms, and the campsite manager let us stay in a permanent marquee-type tent which he had configured as accommodation for visiting musicians. But by the time we had unpacked what we needed from the car, it turned into a drier evening and we enjoyed walking along the river. Not having a tent to take down also allowed us to make an early departure the next morning; after looking at the weather forecast for both Friday and Saturday, we reckoned we should move our visit to Giverny to Friday afternoon. There was a torrential downpour about half an hour before the time on our admission ticket, which we very enjoyably spent in a museum of old industrial engines and such-like. A Miele predecessor to modern washing machines, and a totally fascinating one for making wooden clogs were the ones I most enjoyed. And after that, the garden looked beautiful and fresh in the sunshine with water drops on all the flowers.

We were staying not far away, just beside the Seine, so that was our last river. And we certainly had made the right decision about Giverny. Saturday was dull and grey and rained for much of the day. We did visit the ruins of a nearby castle, built by Richard Lionheart.

No tricks, just treats

We were lucky enough to have a quick trip to Giverny this week. C found out he still had seven days annual leave which he didn't know he was entitled to, and with the luxury of being able to take a day off midweek we were able to check the upcoming weather forecast and  get super-cheap flights to Beauvais, from where it's only a little over an hour's drive. It was a wonderful sunny day, and we had a little mini-holiday. Since the option was a day-trip to Clare/Galway to look for more sloes which we don't really need, and blackberries which it's probably already too late for as it was an early season this year, I think we made a good choice.

Here are a very few of the photos - I have  culled my two-hundred and fifty or so photos into an album with just seventy-two  HERE if you would like to see some more.

This plant fascinated me. They look like something from a fairy garden. These open up onto a white flower, and then when the flower fades leaving a star-shaped seed head, it almost closes back up into a pod again. I think I took at least a dozen photos just of this one plant.