Wet washing day

We returned to Lagrasse yesterday after a few days with Annie at Le Roc.  She was on fine form, and welcoming as ever.  We decided to take a direct but non-motorway route there, via Montolieu, Revel, Grenade and Lectoure, pausing for lunch beside the canal near Grenade.  Not a bad trip, on generally quiet roads, but it did take about six hours, partly because a lot of the communes en route have adopted 30 kph speed limits, enforced by lethal speed bumps. 

Our time with Annie was a relaxing one - lots of chatting, reading and snoozing: I read the latest Ian Rankin thriller in three sittings.  We did take a trip to Marmande to get a couple of big canvases, one of which she painted, in short order, with a semi-abstract rendering of a vase of brightly coloured flowers.  I wish I had her ease with the brushes.

The best part of Le Roc is the big covered terrace at the front, offering views down the garden and across the valley.  It was a little too hot to sit out there on the first day or so, but once temperatures had dropped to the mid-20s it was very comfortable.  As we sat out there we were entertained by the wildlife (swallows, buzzards and the occasional hoopoe), and by the sounds of the cows and a donkey at the farm up the hill.  We even had a visit from a couple of deer at one point.  A propos wildlife, twice in the past week a hare has leapt across the road in front of us - years since I'd seen one.

For much of the time we were also aware of the distant drone of a 45 year old Shorts Skyvan, doing skydiving flights out of La Réole.  An Austrian company, Pink Aviation, operates a handful of these flying sheds in lurid paint jobs, and I seem to remember reading the chronicle of their flying one back to Vienna from where they had bought it somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.  It was the forerunner of the Shorts 360 in which I flew between London and Dundee a few times in the early 1980s.  A robust family of aircraft, it seems, and reputedly very quiet from outside.  (Not so within, I have to say.)

We opted for the motorway route on the way back: it is more bearable on a Sunday when there are very few HGVs on the road, and it took almost exactly half the time of the country roads route.  But why, when the bladder is making its presence felt, is the next aire always closed?  Still, we were home (and dry...) in time for lunch.

Afternoon naps, then an hour or so with our former neighbour Sheila.  There is now a little tapas bar down by the Porte d'Eau, so we sat comfortably in the shade there and put the world to rights with the help of a couple of glasses of pink.

I made a start on the mountain of laundry overnight, and the third batch is chuntering away this morning as I type.  Needless to say, as soon as the first lot out on the line, the sky clouded over, and the rain forecast for late afternoon began.  I'd felt quite virtuous in having the first dozen shirts out on the line before 07:00, and was suitably chastised for my hubris by having to transfer them, before 08:00, to hangers in the top of the stairwell.