Blogs from Centre, France, Europe - page 9

Wednesday 3 June 2015 Amazing how things look after a good sleep. We got quite a surprise at the time - 8:10 am. Today was a quiet day. No long drives, no significant sightseeing, just a quiet day. We seem to be having problems with our toilets on this trip. We broke the flush button in Bayeux, we hit our head on the wall trying to get into the toilet in Auray, we flooded the toilet area with the shower in Nantes, the toilet roll holder fell in the toilet in Granville. Today this toilet wouldn't stop flushing. We hope this trip won't be remembered for the toilets we have met. Luckily a young man, who does, sorted everything out, at least we hope he did. We demonstrated the problem for him and it worked perfectly. ... read more

Geo: 47.4029, 0.779408We spent Friday night pitched on Camping Les Pommiers which is a municipal site just minutes after disembarking at Ouistreham. It was not somewhere we would spend many nights but more than adequate under the circumstances and we soon dropped off to sleep.Yesterday morning (Saturday) we set off for our next destination, Camping Les Acacias, at La Ville-aux-Dames just outside Tours on the Loire. Again, not the best site we have stayed on but the allocated pitch is fairly flat, requiring little levelling, and the loo/shower block very clean, modern, hot showers, so all-in-all not too bad as a stopover. What more would we want? There is a long distance cycle route across the road which would be worth exploring another time.We had our first of many croissants this morning for breakfast. They just ... read more

Geo: 47.1661, 0.238081Breakfast this morning was several different kinds of bread, including brioche and croissants, fruit salad, and goat cheese. Laurent, one of the hotel's owners, recommended that we pour honey on the goat cheese, top it with walnuts that we cracked ourselves in some really heavy duty crackers, and then spread it on some of the bread. I didn't do the honey part, but spreading it on bread was a great idea. Laurent makes his own jam, and there were probably 20 different varieties on the tables: raspberry, strawberry, peach and quince, marmalade, rhubarb, yellow plum, pear, and green tomato and candied lemon (the label read "Please Love Me."), among others. I tried a dollop of Please Love Me, and it was't too bad. It was odd at first because all you could taste were ... read more

Geo: 48.4444, 1.48417I didn't sleep too badly last night. I woke up quite a lot but was able to get back to sleep. I did have some odd dreams though. In one, I was some sort of vengeance demon, and I sneaked up on a small evil person and flung him into space. I don't know where that came from! Must've been the kir before dinner last night.After we had all eaten (the usual sort of selection, and I was able to roll my own ham and cheese crepes), we walked back to the Cathedral and down into the lower town by the river Eure. At one time, the river was used for all sorts of awful trades and was generally filled with offal and other nasty stuff. When most of those trades were no longer ... read more

Rather sad to leave our very pleasant site in the Dordogne but need to take another step nearer to home. We really are having a lovely holiday. Superb weather, super campsites and scenic routes from one to the other. Can hardly complain if today we need to use some motorway to get us further North. Loaded up and on our way by 9am. I queried with the very friendly, and laid back, campsite owner how long she had been at the campsite. This is the first year. That explains why in 2011 we rejected this site because of bad reviews. I cannot praise it enough now, a treasure of a campsite. We headed first of all to Brive using ordinary roads and this gave us the opportunity to look out for a supermarket as we needed ... read more