France Another trip across France to see how Judith's parents were getting on with their "new" house.
Ferry Friday - We had booked to get the Eurotunnel to Calais. However, French ferry workers were kicking off in Calais and had closed the port and the tunnel two days before we were scheduled to travel. So we hurriedly rebooked onto the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen.Here's my little Honda on the car deck of the ferry (on the left).
Portsmouth Departing Portsmouth we got a nice view of the incoming high-speed ferry, the Spinnaker Tower and an old sailing ship.
Portsmouth Another view of the Spinnaker Tower.
Portsmouth
Ferry A miscallaneous view on the deck of the ferry.
Channel It was a lovely day to cross the Channel.
France About six hours after departing Portsmouth, we got our first view of the French coast near Ouistreham.
Ibis As we didn't arrive in France until almost 10pm, there wasn't much opportunity to do much driving on that day. So we checked in to the Ibis in Caen.
Ibis View Saturday - We arrived at the hotel in the dark and so didn't get to observe the relatively pleasant view from our hotel room.
Chateaubriant Rather than just blast down the motorway to Montbron, we decided to take a scenic route across the beautiful French countryside. At around lunchtime we arrived in Chateaubriant. This is a photo of their chateau. By this time it was starting to get rather hot out.
Auberge We just managed to sneak in to the Auberge for a bite to eat before they stopped serving lunch.
Saint-Nicholas Church After lunch we thought we should go for a bit of a walk around town, although it was starting to get uncomfortably hot out. Here's Saint-Nicholas Church.
Saint-Nicholas Church And here's the inside of Saint-Nicholas Church. It was pleasantly cool in here.
Flowers Some flowers in the street. Pansies I think.
Fortress Here's part of the fortress at the chateau. I couldn't take a wider-angle photo than this as much of it was covered in scaffolding.
Fortress This was the view of Chateaubriant from the wall of the fortress.
Chateau The chateau at Chateaubriant. It was now too hot to spend any more time walking about, so we got back in the car and headed for the coast, where we hoped it would be a bit cooler.
Saint Nazaire A couple of hours later we checked in to the lovely air-conditioned Holiday Inn Express, which is located directly opposite the enormous U-boat bunker, which can be seen in this photo.
U-boat Bunker Inside the U-boat bunker it was pleasantly cool.
U-boat Bunker Here's Judith inside the U-boat Bunker.
Monument After leaving the U-boat bunker we decided to go for a walk along the sea front as it was starting to cool down a bit as the evening wore on.On the beach is this monument to the US forces that liberated Saint Nazaire at the end of World War 2.
Monument A closer look at the monument on the beach.
Intrepid This intrepid fellow was well out onto the mud flats, presumably looking for some sort of shellfish.
Fishing Huts There were a couple of dozen of these fishing huts along the sea front. It would have been interesting to see those in operation. No chance of that with the tide right out though.
Sea Front A view of the Saint Nazaire beach and sea front.
Bar Eventually we reached a bar in the promenade, which looked like an excellent spot to stop for a rest, particularly as they were serving one of my favourite beers - Leffe Blonde. After a couple of beers we decided to call it a day and headed back to our air-conditioned hotel.
Pornic Sunday - We started by taking a scenic route down the coast to Pornic, which is where we almost decided to stay the previous night. They had a lovely beach and marina and there were signs to the "Old Port" and "Chateau", but we still had a long way to drive so couldn't hang around for a look. Definitely looks like somewhere worth coming back to though.
Hot It had got sufficiently hot out that we had to stop in the shade for a few minutes to cool down. In fact we had to reluctantly concede that it was so hot out that it would probably be sensible to drive the last 80 miles with the roof up! Disaster!!
Chateau de Lavaud Late in the afternoon we finally arrived at our home for the next five days - the Chateau de Lavaud
Chateau de Lavaud The beautiful chateau is about a mile-or-so to the North of Montbron and has extensive grounds.
Chateau View This was the view looking towards Montbron from the front of the chateau.
Room This was our room in the chateau. Beautifully presented and spacious, but sadly, not air-conditioned.
Room Our room again, looking from the other end. On the left is the entrance to our bathroom, which has no door on it! That might be taking open-plan living a bit too far I think.
Pool View There was a nice view of the swimming pool from the windows on the East side of our room.
"Garden" View There was a nice view of the large trees that provided some shade in the late afternoon from the window on the West side of our room. Having windows on both sides of our room also created the opportunity of a bit of a cross breeze. Although as the air was basically hot, a bit of a breeze wasn't helping much at this point.
Mystery View A mystery view.
Chateau de Lavaud Monday - This is a view of the back of the chateau. The tables by the swimming pool were where we had breakfast on this day, but it was pretty hot out even at 9am.
Honda A picture of my car in the car park outside the chateau.
Trees Judith amongst the sycamore trees in the grounds of the chateau. We apparently have a sycamore tree in the bottom of our garden. Looking at the size of these, it might be an idea to remove that before it gets out of hand.
Chateau View A view of the chateau from down by the river.
Villebois-Lavalette Even though it was scorchingly hot out (~37C), having come all this way we thought we should make an effort to go out and look at something. So we drove the 20 miles-or-so to the picturesque village of Villebois-Lavalette. This is a view of the village's hilltop fortress.
Villebois-Lavalette Unfortunately the car park was only about half way up the hill, which meant we needed to walk the rest of the way up. Nice views though.
Villebois-Lavalette We passed this church on the way up.
Fortress At the fortress, it turned out that you couldn't just go in and have a look. The next scheduled tour wasn't for about an hour and we didn't fancy hanging around in this heat.
Ramparts So we decided to do a lap of the ramparts, where there seemed to be a fairly refreshing breeze.
For Sale This lovely looking house, which was right next to the ramparts, was for sale. It looked to be immaculately presented and had wonderful views. However, it was rather overlooked from the ramparts.
Fortress I was a bit disappointed with this photo. I thought the sun, which was just eclipsed by the fortress tower, would have created more of a halo effect.
Ramparts Judith on the ramparts.
Villebois-Lavalette Leaving town, there was a nice view of the fortress from the car park of the nearby bricolage (French B&Q). By this point I was resigned to the fact that it was far too hot to drive about with the roof down. Roof up and air-conditioning on was the only way to drive about in this heat. Very disappointing.
Chateau de Lavaud Back at the chateau and there was time for a dip in the pool to cool off a bit before heading out for dinner.
HOT! Tuesday - Boy oh boy it was hotter than ever! Far too hot to be out in the sunshine. We needed to find something to do that was indoors and ideally underground.
Martell An hour's drive away was the town of Cognac, where Cognac comes from. A quick visit to Tourist Information indicated that we'd arrived just in time for an English tour of the Martell distillery. This is a photo of their reception/shop.
Martell Tour Although these barrels are in the dark, they unfortunately weren't underground. However, whilst it was almost 40C outside, it was a relatively comfortable 28C in here.
Martell Tour More barrels in store.
Martell Tour This table contained a selection of Martell's produce from over the years. Apparently the oldest bottle here was around 150 years old!
Storage These huge barrels each hold around 18,000 liters of Cognac and there must have been around fifty of them in this room.
Old Barrels At around 150 years old, these are some of the oldest barrels in storage at the Martell dsitillery.
Bottles A selection of the bottles of Cognac on sale in the shop.
Cognac After the tour we went for a walk down by the river. However, it became rapidly apparent that being outside was not a good plan so we started to look for somewhere indoor/air-conditioned to have lunch.
Jardin Public de Cognac The Jardin Public de Cognac looked lovely, but it wasn't getting us out of the heat. We ended up ducking into a McDonald's, which was a) lovely and cool, and b) had ice cream in abundance.After leaving McDonald's we headed back to the car, which had been parked in the sun for about three hours and was literally too hot to touch. Even the seatbelts were scorchingly hot and I could barely touch my milled aluminium gear knob!
Montbron Chateau Back in Montbron we popped in to see Judith's parents. Unfortunately at this time of day there was no shade in their street, so I had to go and park in the shade of the chateau round the corner. You can just see the front of my Honda poking out of the shrinking shade.
Field We walked past this field of wheat/corn (?) on the way into town for dinner later in the evening. I though it made an interesting picture.
Chateau Wednesday - Still very hot out. We had decided that we couldn't be bothered to drive anywhere on this day, so we walked into town and then walked to the excellent Moulin de le Tardoire for some lunch. Here's Judith passing one of the impressive chateaus on the way to the restaurant.
Lane This would have been a better photo if Judith had been in it, but she had walked off before I got lined up.
Bridge The new(-ish) footbridge over the Tardoire.
Le Moulin de la Tardoire Here is Le Moulin de la Tardoire, where we had a magnificent lunch. Usually people would be sitting outside for lunch, but not on this day as it was still far too hot for that sort of thing.
Tinnies In the evening we popped into the local supermarket to pick up a few bottles of the new Grimbergen Kriek that we'd seen when we were in there earlier in the week. While we were in there we were surprised to see that it's possible to buy Leffe in cans! Never seen that before.
Grottes du Queroy Thursday - The temperature was still well into the 30s so we were looking for somewhere underground to visit. About ten miles to the West of Montbron is the Grottes du Queroy. Caves are always a good bet in hot (or cold) weather as they're invariably around 10-12C all year round. Unfortunately these caves appeared to be closed. Doh!
Sunflowers We decided to take a meandering route back to Montbron, which took us past many fields of sunflowers, which looked wonderful in the sunshine. So I pulled over to take a few photos.
Leclerc On the way through La Rochefoucauld we popped into the Leclerc supermarket with the itention of buying some stuff to have a bit of a picnic down by the river. However, the food in their cafe looked and smelled so appealing that we decided to have lunch in there instead (and there was air-conditioning). This most excellent pizza cost less than five quid!Then back to the chateau for a ouple of hours of cooling down in the pool.
Le Moulin de la Tardiore As it was our last full day in Montbron, in the evening we went back to Le Moulin de la Tardiore with Judith's parents for dinner.
Le Moulin de la Tardiore Here's the weir at Le Moulin de la Tardiore.
Le Moulin de la Tardiore A miscellaneous river view at Le Moulin de la Tardiore.
Ibis Friday - We were booked on a ferry from Ouistreham first thing on Saturday morning, so we wanted to stay nearby on Friday night. As it was still hot out (only low 30s now!), a cross-country roof-down blast was out of the question. So we zipped staight up the motorway and arrived at the Ibis in Ouistreham late in the afternoon.Here's Judith in our room, which I think must be one of the smallest hotel rooms I've ever stayed in.
Ibis Still, the public areas of the hotel were light and bright.
Grand Bunker Museum A short walk from the hotel was The Grand Bunker Museum. The museum is in a heavily fortified, five storey World War 2 bunker that was captured on D-Day.
Bunker View This is the view from the top of the bunker.
Binoculars Although this device looks like a telescope, it's actually a pair of binoculars used for range finding. There was another one, twice the size, on the roof of the bunker.
Binoculars From the other size, it's slightly more obvious that it's binoculars and not a telescope.
Cheerful This guy is looking pretty cheerful considering the opposition have just overrun his heavily fortified bunker.
Grand Bunker Museum Outside there are a few military vehicles.
Grand Bunker Museum
Landing Craft In addition to the vehicles, there is also this landing craft, which is apparently the very one that Tom Hanks and his chums used during the filming of Saving Private Ryan.
Dinner After leaving the Grand Bunker Museum we went for a bit of a walk on the impressive beach before heading down the pedestrianised high street, which was full of restaurants and bars. There were so many it was tricky picking one to have dinner in.
Sunset After dinner we headed back to the beach to watch the sunset. At almost 10pm there were loads of people turning up with their kids and footballs and stuff. Very bizarre.This was about as exciting as the sunset got before the sun descended into a thick bank of cloud. It was time to head back to the hotel in anticipation of a fairly early start the following morning.
Port Saturday - We awoke in the middle of a thunderstorm! No rain though. We packed the car and headed for the ferry terminal while the thunder and lightning continued in the distance. Here are some of the caravans and camper vans queuing to board the ferry.
France Our last view of France as the ferry left.
Isle of Wight Approaching England, the first land we saw was the Isle of Wight.
Portsmouth There were a lot of people out and about in the sunshine in Portsmouth.
Naval Dockyard The naval dockyard is right next to the ferry terminal. They were filling one of the dry docks as we passed.
Naval Dockyard Here's HMS Illustrious (in the background), which was decommissioned in 2014. I don't know what the little ship in the foreground is.Shortly afterwards our ferry docked and an hour after that we were home again.Despite the insane heat and the limited opportunities for top-down motoring, we had an excellent week.Total distance driven this week - 1,055 miles (although it would have been closer to 1,500 if we'd stuck with our original plan of driving to Folkestone and getting the Eurotunnel to Calais, which would have been a catastrophe anyway as the migrants were still causing massive disruption to the services).