My brevity in making this report lies in the fact that once again I am sans connection, internet-wise, and can only expel the odd post when Madame Melling is kind enough to allow me to spit a post out via her very smart phone facility hot spot link up.
In essence then: we stuck to the route previously published (and corrected on the road by Mme Melling for spelling mistakes etc. etc) and we didn’t stick to the route hardly at all in the Auvergne. It was pretty damned successful — what a team! Before that, just an hour or two off the boat, we didn’t stick to the route enough to be able to report exactly where it was we took our first roadside breakfast… It was where we encountered our first proof requirement this trip, of our Covid19 double vaccination status, managed via our various digital devices that are almost as important an accessory to every day life now as the pair of specs, hearing aid, sensible shoes, proof of identity, small change, sun hat, insect repellent, shower-proof cape, walking poles etc. etc. one necessarily has to have about one, when one is out-and-about.
Thumbs up, we got our grande crēmes.
Highlights of this transfer? Lots, but as already indicated above, this has to be brief, so I’ll confine myself to the three lighthouses which I alluded to as targets in an earlier post. Initially. On our first day out that is. I’ll have to amend my appendices on my phares sighted blog as well of course, but that can wait until I get internet connection on a more reliable basis… sometime in November I suspect. Here are the three lighthouse ‘postcards’ then:
On the second day of our journey, leaving behind our little hotel opposite the station in Bâtz-sur-Mer, adjacent as it is to the productive salt flats of Guérande, we stick to the route foretold with only the slightest variation directed by Mme Melling — sandwiches (poulet, salade et mayo, très bien) besides the silvery Loire, the temperature flickering around the 26° mark. We manage a drink also thereabouts, roadside. I have to admit to draining two pressions, I can you know, even Fr. beer, when the sun is high in the sky… thereafter we drive on and arrive at Châteauroux, our second over-nighter.
In the process, our route takes us through the Touraine region where we acquire the aformentioned fine wines from a trusted and long frequented domaine outlet. This time it isn’t Sunday or lunch time so they are waiting and ready for us — although not to the extent of having the labels stuck on the bottles of our preferred 'Cot' variety, so we can’t have any of that (the proprietor implies he would be guillotined if he attempted to sell us our desired 100% ’Cot’ in bottles sans labels: it just can’t be done without receiving the ultimate sanction for such an infringement).
Never mind: at time of writing I can report that the one bottle we have already dispatched was lyrical in its luscious floral liquorician loveliness… no complaints at all. Not a hint of your tannins, thank you very much. 2017 vintage mind, so a bit more than a toddler.
On the third day we rose again (please excuse the biblical allusion – I did sleep like one dead to the world, for several hours at least, so…). Châteauroux to Le Puy-en-Velay. Breakfast provender secured in Tati’s Saint-Sévère-sur-Indre, united with excellent café-crèmes in Boussac. Another golden September day this, and mostly off-piste, leastways as we got into the volcano lands.
Dashed fine scenery I can tell you. Punctuated with vultures and similar. We were having chicken sandwiches again, up on top of one of the passes… when our lives flashed before us as a similar-but-not-quite-the-same-as-ours 2CV that forms this post’s masthead, went whizzing past…… You may not know… we had one of those once… back in the mists… it too was yellow and black (no metallic bleu on ours) — you could watch the road passing under you if you moved the rubber mat in the foot well to one side…… or at least the passenger could…… happy days.
After Issoire we drove on, off piste again, not a particularly eddifying route, contrived on the hoof by Mme Melling to avoid Michelin red roads in the atlas but seemingly lost in the spine of our atlas, or some such. We got to Le Puy via La Chaise Dieu, where we might have expected to get some liquid down us, but the assembled crinklies in the bars we espied simply spurred us on, rather than summoned us thither. Pensioners! Knee deep in La CD they were, so I floored it to Le Puy. Once in the conurbation we finally found the station with a little local help and advice, plus our chosen hotel facing it. Within an hour or two we had revised our opinion of Le Puy-en-Velay a little, a town we have somewhat despised over the last twenty years — almost solely on account of its wretched madonna statue stuck up on a bit of volcano in the town. It used to emerge wraith-like from the clouds and rain, but this time we arrived, stopped and rested in good light and only half cloudy skies. Bon hotel, good supper, easy exit the following morning. I took no snaps.
And that, dear reader, about wraps it up. We extract the motor from the hotel’s garage and leave Le Puy still slumbering, to head across the high pastures of the southern Central Massif, down the almost deserted sweeps and bends of the N102 that precipitate you into the abyss at the bottom of which we breakfast at Theuyts, shop for victuals and petroleum distillate at Lalevade, then on, through to and across the Rhône, without one spot of rain having besmirched our windscreen since departing Bullsmead Towers, arriving dry but complete in Sablet before the mid-day chimes.
The following dawn heralds the best and longest thunderfest we’ve seen this year. Lightning all around, thunder rattling the windows and doors, rain teeming down the gutters and shooting off the terraces.
We are here and I like it!
But note to self: when transiting between addresses, secure drink reserves to carry in the motor. This was the twenty-fifth excursion to our Sablet house; you’d have thought we would have twigged by now. Well we have but on this shout we overlooked it. Didn’t put matter to rights either… Imagine the irony: we left at least a pint of lait and two half full cartons of jus-des fruits in the Bullsmead fridge, simply overlooked upon departure. We could have done with them on the road, I can tell you (although milk cannot be brought into Fr. since Brexit, but what the hell, I’d have drunk it chez nous, before leaving. From the bottle).
This post ends…… here.
I do know how to spell suffice even if it appeared somewhere above uncorrected for a while. I've corrected it now. I thank you.
