No rain yet, oddly enough, but it's cool, with a sharp breeze out of the north. After the last week or so of hot weather in the Languedoc, it came as a bit of a shock to find Calais wet and windswept yesterday. A shame therefore that our hopes of getting away early (we got there soon after 2:00 pm) were dashed. Maybe we've been lucky in previous years: I guess one shouldn't count on jumping queues at a Bank holiday weekend that coincides with the grande rentrée. That aside, the journey was really not too bad, and the cooler weather was handy in view of our dodgy air-conditioner fan.
To our surprise, the A75 is still not complete: we'd to come down to single file over an unfinished section south of Lodève, and as the stretch south of the Pas d'Escalette was already pretty busy, it made for pretty slow going. Still, by the time we reached our overnight stop in Blois, the average speed wasn't far short of 60 mph (during actual driving time - a fair bit less when you take account of the occasional pause-pipi). We'd advance notice that the motorway was pretty clogged around Vierzon, so we took a bit of a detour through the very pretty Loire valley countryside, looking briefly from a distance at my favourite little Château of Cheverny. Visitor numbers have plainly grown since I was last there forty-four years ago: the village looks pretty and well looked after, despite having to make provision for huge visitor car parks. Before we left Blois, we took a ride round the centre to see the château through the car windows. Like Cheverny, the place looks much more cared for than it did in 1966.
Martyn found an excellent minor road that took us pretty well in a straight line to Le Mans, give or take the occasional zigzag down into a river valley and up the other side. Advance warning of bouchons on the A16 after Boulogne seemed to be false alarms so far as we could see, but it used up some of what turned out to be our copious free time. A thing that has struck us all over France is the effort communities are putting into their floral displays. Lagrasse is a bit of an exception, I fear, though the baker has put out some very pretty tubs of bedding plants - probably to stop people parking across his frontage. In Calais, the square in front of the Town Hall looks somewhat incongruously cheerful, with tall bedding plants cheerfully masking Rodin's evocative statue depicting the sufferings of the Bourgeois de Calais. But since the Town Hall tower is shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins, a bit of distraction is welcome, I guess.
We've left John and Margaret in charge at Château Smith following a really enjoyable week with them. Apart from the day in Sète and a trip into Carcassonne for a tour of the citadel followed by lunch, we did a whole lot of not very much, which is as good a way to spend a holiday in good company as I can think of. The bug screens John and I put up have pretty well cured the problem of flies in the house. One design flaw, however: when we were at a very late stage of stapling the screen to the window aperture, Martyn emerged from a small place that encourages peaceful contemplation of the problems of the world and said: 'what happens when you come to close the shutters?'. Temporary solution, then: one corner of the screen is held back with a lightly-affixed staple that will have to be removed and replaced every time we open the shutters. So much for the combined design skills of a Chartered Engineer and a Master of Arts. BA Hons Business to the rescue.
All seems well back at Forges-l'Evêque, thanks to Celia's ministrations to the garden and the eponymous Mr Waterman's work on the central heating (which we needed last night!). I shall get out and do some hay-making later. Or maybe tomorrow. Two days' travelling followed by a trip to the supermarket take it out of an old geezer, you know!
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