Back to base

We had a lovely time with Annie and her other guests at Le Roc.  Of the six meals we had there, we only had one indoors, and this in mid-September.  The travelling is pretty familiar these days, though we did knit ourselves a bespoke route from south of Toulouse over to Annie's.  Views of the Pyrenees were limited in the hazy sunshine, but all the more tantalising for that.  We had lunch at Le Café du Palais in Ribérac in the Dordogne, where the service, snack lunch and ambience were just fine, give or take a missing lavatory seat.

It's the wall - honest...

The hotel in Le Mans turned out to be rather quirky: our room had four windows - horizontal slits arranged randomly on the wall.  We were at  the end of the corridor, having arrived early, so one of the walls sloped out to follow the external wall of the building.  Dinner was competent and reasonably priced, but probably a bit much after a day on the road - we slept badly.  The bathroom was something of a triumph of style over function: the shower door doubled as the bathroom door, leaving a gap at the bottom the height of the shower pan.  It neither kept the water inside the shower cubicle, nor gave any privacy in the bathroom.  Breakfast, at €9, was exorbitant, and the hot drinks supplies in the bedroom were the usual sh1te - Lipton's Yellow Label tea, the banishment of which from the face of the earth, as you know, will be my first legislative act after graciously assenting to assume absolute power.  Good job we'd packed the tea kit, which includes Twining's Everyday tea bags, a teaspoon and two IKEA mugs.  And a heeltap of fresh milk that we'd brought from Lagrasse, via Annie's fridge and a cool bag, maintained thus by a frozen 2-litre Schweppes tonic bottle full of water. 

The hotel's location was interesting, though: right at the southern end of the Mulsanne straight of the motor racing circuit.  As we left, we'd to drive up it, hoping not to meet any Porsches coming the other way at 230 mph.  I suggested to Martyn, who was driving the first leg, that he should keep it down to 150 mph until the engine was properly warmed up.

Frustrating day so far today.  Martyn went to collect a parcel from the sorting office, only to find that it had been sent back to Germany.  I went off to the county town for a meeting with a policeman, who had double-booked, so had to turn round and drive the 20 fruitless miles back again.  Cross-making since (1) Martyn's parcel ought to have arrived well before we left for France, and (2) I'd planned our travelling around the supposed date with the policeman.  Needless to say, I am not free to disclose the capacity in which I was involved in the latter.