Montbron Popping over to Montbron to visit Judith's parents.
Ferry Friday - We got the overnight "Economie" ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre as it was over £200 cheaper than getting the "regular" ferry from Portsmouth to Caen, even though Caen is only about 25 miles from Le Havre. Part of the "Economie" experience was to park your car on the roof of the boat, thereby exposing it to all of the cross-Channel elements.
Le Havre Saturday - We awoke to the sight of Le Havre. Another aspect of the "Economie" experience is that it takes ages to get the cars on and off the ferry, so we weren't out on the open road until well over an hour after the ferry docked. An hour after the Le Shuttle train arrives in Calais I'm usually about 60 miles from Calais. Still, the ferry was an experience.
Intermarche We had a straighforward and relaxing 350 mile drive to Montbron on the excellent French motorways, only getting stuck in heavy traffic for a short while around Tours.On arriving in Montbron, the first thing we did was pop into the local supermarket (the Intermarche) to stock up on supplies as we were staying in a cottage rather than a hotel, so would be required to perform a certain amount of fending for ourselves.The exchange rate had taken a bit of a tumble with the Brexit vote a week earlier, but with bottles of wine available from £1 (!), it was likely that we weren't going to need to do without holiday essentials.
Cottage/Gite Having left the supermarket we headed for our cottage (or gite as this sort of accommodation is often referred to in France).Our gite was about a mile from the centre of Montbron, down a very quiet country lane. It's the building on the right in this photo.
Gite View The gite at pretty much on the top of a little hill, so there were lovely views across the countryside.
Gite Here's a closer look at the gite and the surrounding barns. I think the gite itself had probably been a barn at some point.
Lounge Inside our gite was beautifully presented and very comfortable.
Lounge Looking from the dining area to the stairs.
Landing This all looks very nice, but what you can't see in this photo...
Landing ...is that the doors into the bedrooms are really, really low. Judith's only 5'2" and even she needed to duck to get through.
Lamp A nice lamp in the gite.
Dinner Having unpacked and settled in, Judith's parents came over and we all went out for diner. The excellent Moulin de Tardoire restaurant was only about a 15 minute walk from our gite, down the lovely lane you can see in the photo.
Moulin de Tardoire Here's Judith enjoying a very excellent steak for dinner.We didn't leave the restaurant until about 11pm, by which time it was pretty dark. Fortunately we'd taken torches for the walk home.And so ended our first full holiday day.
Horses Sunday - Judith had some work to do in the morning (!), so I decided to go out for a bit of a walk. These horses were living in the field behind our gite.
Trail There are just miles and miles of lanes like this in the area. Fortunately, rather than having to just walk around randomly, about a mile-and-a-half from our gite was one of the formal trails that radiates out from a nearby activity centre called le Chambon. So I headed for there and started to follow that trail.
Door/window An interesting looking door/window in the side of a chateau that I passed on the trail.
Trail Fortunately the trail was well marked and easy to follow.
More trail
Dragonfly At one point, when I'd stopped for a bit of a rest, this dragonfly landed a few feet from me. It was huge - about three inches long I reckon - and seemed quite happy to sit and have it's photo taken. I took this photo from a distance of about a foot.
Dragonfly After a couple of minutes it moved to a nearby leaf to give me a more interesting background to photograph it against.
Dragonfly Remarkable.
Woods Occasionally the wide open trail detoured onto proper single track trail in the woods...
Trail ...before returning to the open fields.
Beer I managed to walk about 12 miles before returning to our gite, which was somewhat further than I had anticipated when I set out. Time for a well earned beer.
Owl Monday - I'd seen this little owl around the gite a few times since we arrived, but it always flew off within a few seconds of me spotting it. I took this picture through the lounge window because whenever I went outside it flew off. But it still seemed to be aware that I was there (because it's looking right at the gite) and flew off again as soon as I went outside.
Ramparts Having secured my owl photo, we headed to Angouleme for a look around. The most prominent feature of Angouleme is the Ramparts, which offer an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. Judith is just visible on the left here.
Wall Art Angouleme is also famous for its art, which might cover the entire side of a building, as seen in this photo...
Wall Art ...or might just be a painting on a wall.
Wall Art Angouleme is also famous for comic strips, which are also present in the wall art
Street Sign Even the steet name signs are done in the shape of little speech bubbles. Almost everywhere you stand around the centre of Angouleme you can see some sort of wall art. Unfortunately the day we were there all of the museums were closed.
Ramparts Judith on the Ramparts.
Memorial A war memorial. Confusingly it says it's for "the children", but closer inspection seems to indicate that it's actually for all of the people that died in WWI and WWII.
Statue An impressive statue on the Ramparts. The sky came out quite nicely too.
Cathedral Inside the Cathedrale Saint-Pierre d'Angouleme.
Lunch This was the restaurant where we had a very nice lunch
Charente It had been quite cloudy all morning, but by the time we'd finished lunch the clouds were breaking up nicely. We decided to head down to the river (the Charente), which looked very pretty from up on the Ramparts.
Scorchio! Once the sun was out, the temperature started to climb.
Charente A boat on the Charente.
Statue A statue on a bridge over the Charente.
Cinema A sign said that this lovely building was actually a cinema! The internet says it's called the Festival du Film Francophone.
Window An interesting window to add to my collection of interesting windows and doors photos.
Bridge View A nice view from the Rue de Saintes bridge.
Street View Back up on the Ramparts we made our way through the picturesque, tiny streets back to the car.
Gite Back at the gite there was a bit of dappled shade to give some relief to the heat, so we had a bit of a sit down and a glass of wine before heading into town to meet Judith's parents.
Chateau This is the "small" chateau just up the road from Judith's parents' house, looking quite nice in the "golden hour" sunshine.
Sunset An hour-or-so later we were treated to this lovely sunset.
Church Much later on, we were back at our gite. The sky was looking pretty clear and full of stars, so I thought I'd pop out and take a few photos.I took this photo of the church in Montbron using my compact Panasonic camera set to full auto mode. It's really getting tough these days to justify fiddling with your cameras settings when full auto does such a very good job practically all of the time.
Milky Way A hundred yards from our gite I got a lovely view of the Milky Way over our gite.
Stars
Star Trails I set my camera going taking a stack of 40 photos to make a star trails photo, but as the minutes ticked by it seemed that I could see fewer and fewer stars. A close inspection of the photos afterwards indicated that very hazy cloud was passing by and obscuring the fainter stars.Still, as I'd stood around in the dark for half and hour taking the photos, I thought I'd be as well to stack them. Whilst the star trails are visible, they're a bit disappointing compared to what I was expecting. Doh!
Futuroscope Tuesday - We had driven past Futuroscope a few times on our way to and from Montbron and thought it looked like an interesting way to spend a day. It was a bit of a hike from Montbron (about 90 miles), but it was a nice enough drive. We arrived just before lunchtime so if there were any entrance queues we had missed them.
Futuroscope Although Futuroscope is a theme park, there are no actual rides as such. It's all 3D simulators. Which is sort of okay in small doses, but I'm not a great fan of getting thrown around in an effectively stationary carriage whilst a giant screen in front of me tries to convince my brain that I'm hurtling up/down/through something or other.
La Gyrotour This was quite good though. You get on, it goes up, you have a look around, it comes down again.
La Gyrotour It was about 150 feet high, so offered quite a good view.
La Gyrotour View Here's the view. As it also slowly turns, you eventually get to see the view in all directions wherever you're sitting. Nice.
Studio 16 There was a brilliant film about the D-Day landings on in here. One of the best things I saw all day.
Arthur Another getting-thrown-about-without-going-anywhere 3D simulator. Impressive building though.
L'Arena Fun Xperiences This was impressive to look at and also one of the most entertaining places we visited. It's basically full of loads of interactive things, from slides to games consoles. Very entertaining.
L'Arena Fun Xperiences L'Arena Fun Xperiences from a different angle.
Sky Bar As unlikely as it seems, this is actually a bar. When they've got enough people, the bar slowly rotates up the tower so you can enjoy the view while you enjoy your drink.
Sculpture There were loads of these weird sculptures around the park. This one was flying a kite.
Les Apprentis Pompiers This looked pretty entertaining. Three teams of four people pump the handles in their little fire truck to race each other down the track...
Les Apprentis Pompiers ...to the fire, where they have to pump more handles to pump the water to put out the "fire".
The Bonkers Boat This didn't appear to have a name. I just think of it as The Bonkers Boat. Completely unsupervised by any park staff, a person gets in the little boat at the bottom of a ramp and pulls a cord, which causes the little boat to be hoisted to the top of the ramp. After a couple of seconds the boat is released and propelled into the air before splashing down in the pool. It looked like a lot of fun though.
Futuroscope Futuroscope is very French in that there are no signs in any other language (except for safety warnings), the restaurant menus are in French, etc. So I thought it was a bit strange that this "sculpture" said "GREEN" and not "VERT".Anyway, that was it for our day at Futuroscope. Personally I prefer actual physical rides to the simulators, but I think everyone would find it to be an entertaining and interesting day out.
Sky It got dark not long after we got back to our gite, so I popped outside to have another go at a star trails photo. As it was actually really dark out (contrary to what you appear to be able to see in this photo), I took a couple of test photos that demonstrated that the sky was actually still quite bright. But as I was out with all of my kit anyway I thought I'd be as well to set a stack of photos going.
Star Trails 1 And this is what my first stack of forty photos came out like. The sky is still rather bright, but it's picked up quite a lot of stars.By the time I'd finished taking this photo it was properly dark out, so I set another stack going.
Star Trails 2 And here's what my second stack of forty photos came out like. You can see that the sky is much darker now.
Star Trails 3 Just out of interest, I stacked all eight photos I'd taken, just to see. I've lost the dark sky of the later photos, but it's created much longer star trails (twice as long if you want to be pedantic about it).
Milky Way To finish off, I took a couple of photos of the Milky Way.
Milky Way
Piegut-Pluviers Wednesday - Wednesday is market day in Piegut-Pluviers. It's about twenty miles from Montbron, but we had been told that it was well worth a visit. And it was. The market is huge, occupying around half-a-mile of the town's high street, and there were an impressive range of goods for sale. People must have come from many miles around because it was well busy.
Piegut-Pluviers It was also pretty scorching hot out. Hot enough for Judith to feel the need to buy a hat.
Saint-Jean-de-Cole After spending a couple of hours walking around the market we went to the super-picturesque village of Saint-Jean-de-Cole for lunch.Here's Judith (wearing her new hat) standing outside the lovely restaurant that we had lunch in.
Dog During lunch I adopted a dog (or was perhaps adopted by a dog), which took up residence under my chair.
Saint-Jean-de-Cole After lunch we had a bit of a walk around the village. Here's Judith's dad on the bridge.
Saint-Jean-de-Cole Some buildings.Time to head back to Montbron.
Chateau Back in Montbron Judith and I popped in to the chateau up the street from Judith's parents to have a look at an exhibition they were having.There was some really nice stuff, like these sculptures.
Sculptures The same sculptures from the other end of the room (I couldn't decide which picture I preferred, so I've included them both).
Pictures There were also a lot of pictures. Some were really nice. Some were awful (in my opinion). All were for sale (but they were quite expensive and not really for the likes of me :o).
Chateau View This was the view from one of the windows on the top floor of the chateau.
Village de Constant Thursday - One of Judith's Holiday Property Bond resorts was only around 60 miles from Montbron so we thought this would be an excellent opportunity to pop in and have a look.Basically they bought a small, derelict village in the middle of nowhere and completely rennovated it. This is the entrance to the resort.
Village de Constant Having parked the car, we headed off into the resort.
Restaurant We soon found the resort's restaurant, which had just opened for lunch. In fact the chef said we were his first customers of the season. You'd have thought we might have been entitled to some sort of discount for that, but no. Lovely lunch though.
Village de Constant The resort was beautifully presented.
Swimming Pool There were three large swimming pools - two outdoor and one indoor - plus this little kiddie pool.
Village de Constant Lovely scenery, what with the resort being in the middle of nowhere. I reckon they will have some impressive night skies here.
Village de Constant Judith on some steps.
Village de Constant It was time to head back to Montbron to meet the owner of our gite for a tour of her chateau.
Chateau Drive We parked back at our gite and headed for the chateau. Turned out the drive was 0.6 miles long so it took a bit longer to get there than we anticipated. Here's Judith on a shady bit of the drive (which was nice because it was still rather warm out).
Chateau Our first view of the back (I think) of the chateau.
Chateau Approaching the entrance.
Roof I didn't take any photos while we were being shown around as, well, it's their house and it seemed rude. But I had to take this photo in the roof because it was so amazing. Apparently the roof was made by boat builders who basically just took a boat's hull and turned it upside down.The whole place was very impressive. I can't imagine what it must be like actually living there.
Saint-Sornin Friday - Our last full day in Montbron so we went to the local vineyard to stock up on as much wine as we could fit in the car. This was a view point that we passed on the way there.If you turned up at the vineyard with your own containers, you could fill them with wine from a hose for EUR1-a-litre. That's quite remarkable value for money. We didn't have any containers of our own so we had to make do with wine in regular bottles.
Relaxing Back at our gite we decided to spend the rest of the day relaxing in the shade with some of the wine we'd just bought. Lovely.
BMW An honourable mention to Judith's little car that had been whisking us around the countryside all week in quiet, frugal comfort.
BMW An interesting black and white photo of the approaching sunset.
Golden Hour All week I'd been meaning to take a picture of the fields surrounding the gite in the lovely, golden pre-sunset light. As this would be my last chance I headed out with my camera.
Golden Hour This came out surprisingly well.
Moon I'd been very lucky that there had been no moon out all week to interfere with my star photos, but now we were starting to get glimpses of it just before sunset.
Boot Saturday - It was time to head home. With all of the beer and wine we'd bought we barely managed to get everything in the boot.
Bridge We had a nice, relaxing drive back north (apart from a rather hectic lunch at a very busy motorway service station). We crossed this magnificent bridge over the Seine shortly before reaching Le Havre.
Services There was a lovely service area next to the bridge and it was virtually deserted. I reckon this was because people leaving Le Havre didn't want to stop half an hour after arriving in France and people heading for Le Havre probably didn't feel they had time to stop whilst heading for their ferry. Whatever, if I'm up this way again I shall definitely make the effort to stop in for a meal and a break.The photo is of Judith on the foot bridge over the road.
Bridge A view of the road bridge from the centre of the foot bridge.
Le Havre We arrived at the port less than three hours before our ferry was scheduled to sail so we thought we might get to board pretty quickly. However, Brittany Ferries had other ideas and left everyone cooking in the sunshine for well over an hour.
Ferry Back on the top of the ferry, leaving Le Havre. We were on a day crossing this time, but we'd still booked a cabin. As the crossing took six hours it was nice to have somewhere to go and lay down for a bit of a snooze.
Sunset We approached Portsmouth just as the sun was setting. It was a massive palaver getting off the boat and through customs (in fact that took longer than the drive home!).However, we'd had a thoroughly excellent week and you can't ask for more than that.