Constant We had to wait all the way to Easter for our first full week off of the year, when we went for our first proper residential visit to HPB Constant. We had popped in last year for a look while we were in the area.I apologise in advance that there are a large number of photos in this gallery (probably more than a hundred), but the weather and the scenery were so nice that it was tricky even cutting my selection down to this. I've discarded literally dozens of photos that would have easily made it into any of my other galleries.
Ferry Thursday - Legged it home from work to sling our stuff in the car and head off to Portsmouth for the overnight ferry to Caen.
Commodore Cabin As luck would have it, one of the few cabins remaining when we booked was this three bed "Commodore" cabin, complete with TV and two windows! I think it would be fair to say that it was nicer than the last cruise ship cabin I stayed in. Although arguably it's a bit more than you need for an overnight Channel crossing.
Peage Friday - We were off the ferry by 8am and heading South. This was the state of the motorway at about 9am on Friday morning as we passed the fairly large city of Le Mans. France is so awesome.We presssed on South for about five hours before leaving the motorway for more scenic rural roads.
BMW This was the first continental outing for Judith's new motor, which was looking almost as splendid as the weather and the lovely villages that we were driving through.
Constant By mid-afternoon we arrived at our destination - the village of Constant. Here's Judith's car blocking the entrance to the village so that I can get a nice photo.
Cottage Judith had outdone herself again and booked us this lovely three bedroom cottage for the week.
Lounge This was our lounge.
Dining Room This was our dining room, but we didn't use this much at all as, due to the fabulous weather, we ate on the patio most of the time.
Bedroom 1
Bedroom 2
Bedroom 3 The one with the en-suite.
View This was the view from our kitchen and dining room windows.
Beer Although we had a very well equipped kitchen and had brought a reasonable supply of food with us (that we had supplemented with some perishable supplies on the way down), as we'd been travelling all day we decided to pop down to the on-site restaurant for dinner.Handily they served Grimbergen (blonde and amber).
After Dinner After dinner I went out with my camera to watch the sunset.While I was waiting for sunset I entertained myself taking a few photos. However, I've made a tragic error with this one because you can see the shadow of my tripod in the photo! I should really have re-taken it without the tripod in, but I couldn't be arsed.
Field The field adjacent to the village was looking impressive in the pre-sunset light.
Sunset.
Pre-dawn Saturday - I got up about 90 minutes before sunrise to see if there were any good star photo opportunities. However, as it was almost a full moon the sky to the West was bright with the setting moon and the sky to the East (in the photo) was pretty bright even an hour before the sun was due to rise.
Constant For anyone that cares, this is a six photo HDR stack. It's hard to imagine looking at the photo, but it was actually very dark where I was standing, even though the photo makes it look almost like daylight.
Sunrise Having failed to get any star photos, I thought' I'd be as well to hang around for sunrise and get a photo of that. Unfortunately as the sky was so clear the sun was already very, very bright even as it came up over the horizon, so this was the only usable photo I got. Usually the atmosphere would disperse the light a bit more, making the sun into a bright orange/red disc that can be easily photographed for the first few minutes after sunrise. But not on this day.
Walking As I was up and about, I though I'd go out for a short walk. Specifically walk 2 from the walking pack, as provided by the village management. Much of the route was down very minor "roads" like this.
Saint Felix de Villadeix The approximate half way point of the walk was in the nearest village to Constant, Saint Felix de Villadeix, which is a couple of miles away. This is the village church.
Walking Back The walk back to Constant was on more tracks and very minor roads.
Cottage Back at our cottage. That small structure out front is a well. We tried throwing a coin in and it fell for a surprisingly long time before hitting water! At a guess I'd say that the well is maybe sixty or seventy feet deep!
Village View This was the view from the village-facing window of our bedroom.
Daisies There were lots of pretty daisies out on the lawns before the gardeners mowed them all down a couple of days later. Doh!
Roads We popped out to the local supermarket for some supplies and were immediately reminded that one has to be vary wary on the roads in the vicinity of the village because many of them as not much wider than a car!
Pool Room Back at the village later, we had a wander around while we waited for Judith's parents to arrive. Here's the pool room.
Parking Sunday - We thought we'd have a drive out to the Chateau de Baynac, which is allegedly one of the most popular tourist destinations in the area. With it being such a lovely sunny Sunday, we were concerned that it might be rather busy. However, the car park was giving a distinctly different impression.
Stairs The chateau it at the top of a fairly large hill and the car park is at the bottom, so it's a bit of a hike up to the entrance.
View But boy oh boy is it worth making the effort.
Panorama A mini panorama of the view from the chateau.
View West The view from one of the towers looking West.
Furnished This is the only furnished room in the entire building.
Window View Nothing particularly interesting to see here, but I thought it looked nice.
Portrait A photo of Judith using the blurry background portrait mode on my phone.
Chateau View A miscellaneous view looking to the East.
Chateau View Despite all of the magnificent views from the chateau, it's actually quite difficult to get a good view of the chateau itself. This was the best I managed.
View South The view to the South.
Limeuil On the way home we stopped in to have a quick look at the pretty village of Limeuil, which looked lovely.
Sparrow Back at Constant I took a few photos of the sparrows that were hanging around our cottage.
Sparrow Another sparrow.
Moon It turns out that it's harder to take a photo of the moonrise than you might think and I included this photo, which I took with my SLR once the moon was well up in the sky, to remind myself of that.
Walking Monday - Up early(-ish) to do walk 1 from the walking pack.
Walking It was similar to walk 2, but much more interesting terrain.
Village In just over an hour I was back in the village for second breakfast.
Village View Judith out walking in Constant Village after breakfast.
Barrage de Tuilieres Judith's parents headed off to their home shortly after lunch. As there was still a fair chunk of daylight left, we headed out to do a little sightseeing. The hydro-electric power station at the Barrage de Tuilieres was only twenty minutes drive away, so we thought that mght be worth a look (and it was).
Barrage de Tuilieres
Heron I'm quite pleased with how this came out because the heron was really quite a long way off, so my little Panasonic camera was on full zoom when I took this.
Salmon Lift When we read that they had a salmon lift, we didn't think they really meant an actual lift!
Salmon Lift In this diagram, that Judith is helpfully pointing to, you can see that the salmon swim into the lift, the doors close, the lift rises around fifty feet or so, the doors open and the salmon swim out. A salmon lift. Amazing.
Window They've also handily installed this window so that you can see the salmon swimming out of the lift. They haven't made it too easy for them though as the water flows past here at quite a rate of knots.I've got quite a good slow motion video of some salmon swimming past the window.
Canal After entertaining ourselves watching the salmon for twenty minutes or so we decided to undertake the fairly short walking pack walk 4, which handily started from the Barrage de Tuilieres and went along the pretty canal you can see in the photo.
Heron Another heron. Or maybe the same one. I don't know. I'm not an expert.
Canal and River Dordoigne It's not often that you get a canal and a river in the same photo (at least not in my experience).
Return Leg The return leg of the walk was down a quite picturesque and largely deserted country road (which would have been even more deserted had it not been on the detour route for a nearby closed road!).
Scorchio! Considering it was only the first week of April, the temperatures were getting right up to what I would consider to be more than acceptable for a summer's day.We made it safely back to the car and headed back to the village.
St Felix de Villadeix On the way home we stopped in for a look at the nearby village of St Felix de Villadeix.
High Street This is what passes for the high street in St Felix de Villadeix.
Church And this is their church. Very pretty.
Cows Tuesday - Up pretty early again to have a go at walking pack walk 6, which at just under eight miles is the longest walk in the pack (I think).In the background of this photo you can see that there is mist in the bottom of the valley.
Misty And here I am I short time later in the mist in the bottom of the valley. I think this is one of my favourite photos of the week.
Misty More misty scenery.
Normal Scenery As the sun climbed higher into the sky and it started to warm up, the mist soon started to clear.
Scenery This was by far the most scenic of the walks I'd tried this week, with much of the route being on good, easy to follow trails like this.
Lamonzie-Montastruc At the apprxomate half way point of the walk was the pretty little village (aren't they all though?) of Lamonzie-Montastruc, which, for a while until I read the sign properly, I thought was called Lamonzie-Monster-Truck.
Trail More lovely trails on the way back.
Blossom Back at the village and it appeared that the tree behind our cottage now had much more blossom on it than when we arrived.
Bergerac As I'd started my walk early, even though it was quite long I was back at the village for late morning. With much of the day left, we decided to head to Bergerac, the nearest large town, for a look.The marker post that Judith is standing next to shows the height of the floods that have beset Bergerac over the years. The red line at the bottom is 10 meters above the normal river level, with the town having been flooded beyond that eleven times, the highest being at almost fourteen meters in 1728.
Status One of the town's statues of Cyrano de Bergerac in a pretty square.
Statue Another much more realistic looking status of Cyrano de Bergerac in another square.
Cathedral Bergerac Cathedral.
Cathedral Inside Bergerac Cathedral. You have to go in really, even though all cathedrals are pretty much of a muchness inside I reckon.
Flowers I think we'd been a bit spoiled by all of the beautiful places we'd seen so far because Bergerac seemed a bit disappointing. Although they did have some very lovely flower displays.
Chateau Monbazillac Having become bored with Bergerac, we headed for the nearby "world famous" (although I'd never heard of it) Chateau Monbazillac, where they apparently make quite a lot of wine. It was very impressive though.
Chateau Monbazillac The chateau is set in a commanding posistion, looking out over the vineyards to the North.
Cellar In their basement they have what they claim to be seven thousand bottles of wine maturing. I suspect that these bottles might not actually be wine at all and are just for display purposes.
Swimming Later on, back at the village, we thought it was time we tried out the swimming pool. The indoor one at least. The outdoor one was full of children doing that thing that children do of communicating by screaming into each other's faces. No under 16s allowed in the indoor pool. Nice.
Swimming We had the whole place to ourselves, which was a very nice and relaxing way to end the day.
Abri de la Madeleine Wednesday - We'd headed a bit further afield to the pre-historic settlement of Abri de la Madeleine. We parked in the woods and headed off down a trail towards the visitor center.
Cliff View Shortly after leaving the visitor center, the trail emerges onto a cliff top with lovely views of the countryside to the South.
Caves The trail then descends the cliff and you get your first view of the natural caves that formed the settlement.
Cave Here's Judith standing in front of one of the caves. Unfortunately the photo isn't really capturing the scale.
Lizard There had been quite a few of these around all week, but this was the first one that I'd managed to get a photo of.
Fort The site also hosts the ruins of an old fort, which they're just in the process of sprucing up so we were unable to go in at this time.
Caves I'm glad I didn't know how big the holes in the cliff were when I was standing at the top admiring the view.
Canoeing That looks like a lovely and relaxing way to see the scenery.
Tunnel Judith walking through a tunnel.
Tunnel
Church They had managed to perch a church on the ledge, over the tunnel in the previous photos.
Lizard This lizard was posing quite nicely in the sunshine. It looks giant in the photo, but was probably only four inches long.
Rock Window That little bit of rock on the left doesn't look anywhere near sturdy enough to hold up the entire cliff.
Sarlat-le-Caneda Having had a fabulous time at Abri de la Madeleine, we headed off to look for some lunch. The nearby town of Sarlat-le-Caneda looked promising, being very highly rated in the travel guide.
Le Bistrot Sarlat There were lots and lots of very nice looking restaurants, but we settled for Le Bistrot Sarlat, where I had what was quite possibly the finest lasagne I've ever tasted.
Passage des Enfeus The centre of the town is super scenic pretty much everywhere you look. It's like the Brugge of the Dordoigne, but without all of the awesome beer.
Statue du Badaud This statue was apparently made by some famous person (that I'd never heard of).
Ancienne Eglise Sainte-Marie The doors on the back of the Ancienne Eglise Sainte-Marie are probably the biggest doors I've ever seen, with the exception of the ones on the building at the Kennedy Space Center where NASA used to build its rockets.
Cathedrale Saint-Sacerdos Another cathedral. Don't they all just look the same?
Lanternes Des Morts This is the Lanternes Des Morts, which as far as I can tell is basically just a big, posh pigeon house.
Sarlat Street Although the middle of town was very busy, you didn't have to wander far off the main tourist trails to find deserted, but still picturesque, streets.
La Roque-Gageac Having left Sarlat-le-Caneda, we thought we'd pop into the nearby La Roque-Gageac on the way home as it was marked on our map as being particularly scenic.The village is pretty tiny and is perched on this south facing hillside, which meant that it was positively scorchio on a sunny day like this.
Stairs Judith climbing some stairs into the village of La Roque-Gageac.
River View There were lovely views of the river from in the village.
La Roque-Gageac
River View There were lots of canoes on the river and the larger boats that you can see in the photo were talking people on sightseeing tours down the river.
River View
Gouffre de Proumeyssac As we'd visited so many pretty towns and villages, we thought it might be nice to do something a bit different and headed for the Gouffre de Proumeyssac, which is basically a cave.
Gouffre de Proumeyssac Unfortunately the miseries don't let you take photos inside, so this photo of the entrance is as close as I got to taking any photos of the cave. Very disappointing as it was quite impressive. My 360 degree camera would have been awesome in there.
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac After the Gouffre we headed to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, another super pretty village, for some lunch. Having walked down their high street we settled on the Cafe de la Mairie, which you can see in the bottom of the photo.
Lox We were joined for lunch by this hilarious tiny dog, whose name is apparently Lox and who is prone to letting off the occasionally really smelly fart. At least that's Judith's story and she's sticking ot it.
Musee National de Prehistoire After lunch we popped in to the nearby (like 50 yards away) Musee National de Histoire to have a look at their world class collection of things they'd dug out of the ground.For some inexplicable reason we had to go through an airport style security check to get in, complete with metal detector and bag search. I can't even beging to guess what they thought we might be trying to sneak in to their museum.
Rocks Basically it was just fully of loads of intensely dull stuff like this. All of the information boards were only in French, so we had no idea what boring stuff we were looking at.
It's Behind You! There was the odd massive scary animal though, which helped to alleviate the boredom a bit.
Another Tunnel However, after a bit we found our way onto the "roof", which was actually another one of this prehistoric settlements built into caves under a cliff, like we were in a couple of days ago.
Cave View This was much more impressive. We were also the only people that had managed to find our way up here. Presumably everyone else was wasting their time reading about all of the boring rocks and skeletons.
Cave View Time for a bit of a sit down in the shade before we headed back out into the sunshine.
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac Walking through the village.
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac Sitting, having a rest in the village.
Constant Back at our own scenic village, it was still fairly early so I decided to head out for a short walk before dinner. I decided to reprise walking pack walk 1 because it a) was quite pretty, and b) started and ended at the village.
Walking For the variety of it, I did the walk in reverse this time, so you get to see all of the same pretty lanes, but from the opposite direction.
Cows Some cows that I saw on my walk.
Pool Back at the village there was just time for a couple of games of pool before dinner.
Misty Friday - This was the first day since we'd arrived that I had opened the curtains in the morning and not been presented with clear blue sky. As it was also the day we were leaving the village, I wasn't too worried about that.
McDonald's As we'd had to pack up all of our stuff and be out of the cottage for 09:30, we didn't have time for breakfast before we left. So we stopped in to a McDonalds on the edge of Perigueux. It was one of the nicest and most deserted McDonald's I'd ever been in. There only seemed to be two other customers in there with us.
Brantome We had intended to stop in the picturesque town of Brantome for some lunch, but as we'd had quite a late breakfast we decided to just stop in for a look around instead.They had some good reflections on their river.
Abbeye de Brantome Best have a look in there.
Abbeye de Brantome Very similar to all of the other ones, as expected.
Reflections More reflections.
Art Some art on a bridge.
Le Moulin de l'Abbeye This is Le Moulin de l'Abbeye, which is a very posh looking Relais and Chateau group hotel. It was so posh looking that we didn't even see any people in it, presumably because no-one was posh enough.
Le Moulin de l'Abbeye Le Moulin de l'Abbeye and a bridge. Lovely.
Montbron On leaving Brantome we headed for Montbron to see Judith's parents. The newly rennovated stonework was looking extremely nice in the sunshine.
Montbron Their garden was looking very nice too.
Walking We went out for a bit of a walk around the local lanes in the late afternoon sunshine before dinner. A very nice way to end the day.
Walking Again Saturday - We were heading back North, but didn't need to leave until after lunch so we went out for a walk to stretch our legs before spending a few hours sitting in the car.
Tardoire We walked down to the bridge over the River Tardoire. You can see the Moulin de la Tardoire on the left and the chateau owned by the people we stayed with on the right.
Best Western Booking a hotel at one day's notice on the Saturday night of an Easter weekend does limit your options a bit. But for convenience and ease of parking, rather than have to drive into the middle of a town, we booked into a Best Western hotel on the edge of Le Mans, which was about two thirds of the way to the ferry at Ouistreham.When we arrived we were quite surprised to see that the hotel was actually a really nice chateau set in extensive grounds. We were also surprised to see that their large car park only had three cars in it (one of which was ours)!
Best Western The chateau itself is actually quite small (for a hotel), so our room was in this nearby building.
Beer They had lovely Affligem beer on tap (which I wouldn't have enjoyed so much if I'd realised how much it was costing - EUR10, about £8.70!!!).
Illumination A very interesting wall light in the restaurant.
More Illumination A very interesting ceiling light in the restaurant. (You can tell it's on the ceiling because you can see a smoke detector.)Dinner was excellent.
Well That's Annoying Sunday - We noticed on Saturday that one of our tyres appeared to be slowly losing some air. But by Sunday morning it has lost a lot of air. Closer inspection indicated that this was because there was a massive screw stuck in it! Fortunately it was only going down slowly so we were able to pump it back up and head into Le Mans for a look around.
Le Mans Cathedral We parked up near Le Mans Cathedral, where there was a large and interesting market going on with a lot of very nice looking food. Unfortunately we didn't get chance to try any of that as we'd had an excellent and hearty breakfast in the hotel.We didn't go in the cathedral as it was Easter Sunday and there seemed to be a service of some sort in progress, but I've got a pretty good idea what it would have looked like, so not a problem.
Market Some of the market action.
Old Town Le Mans has a really pretty old town, which was completely deserted on Sunday morning as everything was closed.
Hydrant Judith challenged me to try to take a nice picture of this fire hydrant, which was right next to a bin. Came out okay I think. You certainly can't see the bin.
Tunnel This tunnel is right under the middle of the old town. It's rather impressive.
Door An interesting looking door in the old town.
Another Door Another interesting looking door in the old town.
Cathedral View This was a nice view of the cathedral on the way back to the car.
Manhole Cover They even have really nice manhole covers. I must admit that Le Mans was a much nicer place than I was expecting (although I did only see the pretty old town bit - the rest might have been completely rubbish).Anyway, it was time to get back in the car and head for the ferry.
Traffic If anything, the drive to Ouistreham was on even more deserted roads than we'd driven South on when we arrived a week ago. All of the traffic that you can see in the photo is queuing to board the ferry.We had planned to have lunch in Ouistreham before boarding the ferry, but it turns out that almost all of the restaurants in town stop serving lunch at 2pm and we had arrived pretty much exactly at 2pm. Doh!
Ouistreham For a ferry port, Ouistreham is a lovely town, which always seems to have lots of interesting things going on. We got a nice view of the seafront and the beach from the ferry as we departed.
Sunset We even got to see the sunset from the ferry before we arrived back in Portsmouth. What a thoroughly excellent ten days we had in France.Total distance driven this week - 1,226 milesAverage fuel consumption - 46.0mpg