Old haunts

We spent the last two nights of our latest trip at Le Roc, first meeting Annie and her friends Ruth and Roger in Le Louis Vins, which is a few steps from the door of Moissac Abbey.  I was last in the abbey cloister almost exactly 39 years ago, when I was boating with friends on the nearby Garonne lateral canal, and remember being blown away by the skill and beauty of the carvings of the capitals in the cloister.  I was no less impressed this time, and of course the experience was enhanced by Martyn being with me.  The town has improved a whole lot in the intervening decades, with good paving, pedestrian streets, smart floral displays and, of course, an impenetrable one-way system.  Good and inexpensive lunch, excellent company and surroundings.  We paused at Nobby's (E. Leclerc) just by the motorway entrance to refuel and to get the last items on the shopping list.

On the way, we paused on the perimeter of Toulouse airport in the hope of seeing one of the new A350 prototypes.  One of  them had been doing circuits and bumps there the day before: on Friday, there was neither hide nor hair of it.  Still, as a consolation prize, we got a close view of one of the Belugas landing.  (It might have been the same aircraft that I climbed over at the Zürich Flughafenfest in 1998, watching next day from my office window as it took off.  They are getting old now, but Airbus are being forced to make them work harder and harder as A350 production accelerates.  Rumours of an A330-based replacement are building up.)

At Le Roc, it was a familiar pattern of eating rather a lot and sipping pink wine on the terrace, enjoying the views across the valley of the Lysos.  On both evenings there were spectacular storms to the south-east, so my bathroom window may have been tested. 

We did manage to do a little more than sit enjoying les plaisirs de la table, eg visiting the market in Bazas, which is less manicured than Moissac, and which boasts a fine cathedral.  Architecturally a bit of a hotch-potch, the west front, which dominates the market square, starts gothic, rises to a 16th century rose window and culminates in a neo-classical gable.  We admired it over a suitable apéritif while waiting for the others to do the rounds of the market stalls.  Bazas too has a tortuous one-way system, of course.  Rick Stein fans will remember his buying beef from

Herbs and spices, Bazas market

the butcher in Bazas during his Atlantic-Mediterranean 'Odyssey'.  The region prides itself on the quality of its beef, and I've always been impressed by it too.  I just remember the same butcher selling us twice as much meat as we could comfortably eat at one sitting, and not cheaply.

Annie is in the process of buying out the other shareholder in Le Roc, the shared ownership having proved to be problematic from the earliest days.  The co-owner recently put it on the market (or rather, got Annie to undertake all the work involved).  The only offer having been very low, Annie and the other party have agreed a price, and the bureaucracy is slowly processing the deal.  The process of clearing out the remnants of the Previous Administration has begun: let us say just that there were one or two noticeable differences in tastes, and that the purge will fill a couple of skips.  Meanwhile, I did some running repairs on a couple of bits of cheap furniture that came with the house twenty years ago and will remain.

We woke early yesterday, as is so often the case before we travel.  (Just as well, because the battery on my useless mobile phone - my only alarm clock - had gone flat about as quickly as usual.)  We drove out just before 07:00 into thick fog, which stayed with us for the first ten or twelve dark, winding kilometres to the motorway.  Not nice after a poor night's sleep.  We had more fog from Saint-Jean d'Angély until just south of the Loire, and rain from time to time, some of it quite heavy. 

We'd opted for the Bordeaux-Tours-Le Mans-Rouen route this time.  One can decide at Tours whether to do that or Orléans-Paris.  Always hard to decide which to go for: the former route, if a little longer, is much quieter, and avoids both the crushing boredom of the Sologne and the cut and thrust of Paris.  It does, however entail the grind through Rouen and the busy, somewhat inferior A28.  You pays your money, and you takes your choice.  We were at the top of the hole more than two hours before our scheduled departure time, so were invited to go away, and wait for the excess 20 minutes in the holding car park.  (The back wall of the chiottes bears witness to the fact that they hadn't thought to unlock them.)  As we waited, we saw a few dark faces walking across the enclosure and hiding in a ditch, poor souls.  We kept the car doors locked.

On returning to check in, the machine offered us the departure we had originally booked, so we had a couple of hours to wait.  The departure terminal at Coquelles is mainly about over-priced liquor sales, hence not a lovely or useful place to be.  Fortunately it has a coffee shop from one of the big chains, so, fortified with big cups of mint tea bzw. cappucino, we retired to the car and the kindles.  Once we were on the Shuttle train, it did what's it's meant to, and after a couple of chapters of respective biography and whodunit, we were once again in daylight, and jostling with lunatics on the M20.  These days we go for the slower Biddenden-Goudhurst route, which is more direct, uses less fuel per mile, and helpfully brings one in via the M&S Express shop at the Blue Boys pub as was.  So, some fourteen hours after leaving Le Roc, we arrived home equipped with supper and breakfast.  That's our third complete aller-retour by road this year, and each time we wonder afterwards whether it would be easier to fly and rent.  But each time we undergo the airport and cheap flight experience, we have to wonder whether the long drive might be the lesser of two evils.