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Published: September 30th 2005
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Egg #2.
It's me again, with a little update from La Rochelle, on the West coast of France about half way up. Unfortunately I don’t have any near death experiences to tell you about this time, but I’ll do my best to make something up if I feel that its getting a bit tame.
La Rochelle is a med sized harbour town. How to describe La Rochelle?…….
I’d say: nautical, fresh, pretty, well maintained, sunny, pleasant, nautical, white, nautical, bright, breezy, nautical. And just erring slightly on the side of ‘retirement home’.
So, what’s with the nautical malarky? (readers voice). Well, to say that Portland Bill and Captain Pugwash probably went to school here could be the understatement of the year. There’s a port here called ‘Les Minimes’ ……… more like ‘Les Maximes’ - there’s at least 3, maybe 4 BILLION boats moored in Minimes. Now, I know that the psychologist in you is probably starting to see a major boat / harbour obsession pattern forming here – please be assured, its naut intentional. I’m not harbouring any yacht fetishes or watering down my sickness. Honest. We just happened to be in yet another place with loadsa those
French horizontal stripey jumpers, but this time it was the real thing. In fact, one day we were sitting having a refreshing Leffe Blonde in an outdoor bar, and I decided to keep a tally and work out some stats. In half an hour (I timed it BTW – got plenty time on my hands these days) I counted 22 blue and white striped jumpers walking past me. I could have cheated and given extra points for the full bhuna – ie; white trousers, boating shoes and neckerchief – but no, I remained true to the MI calculation methodologies drilled into me from my time spent in the bank. I’m having to approximate the number of people in total walking past my seat, but I’m going to go for an average of 5 per minute, giving me 150 over half hour period.
Stats therefore as follows:
22 striped persons over half hour period = 1.36 people per minute.
22 out of total 150 striped persons walking past = 14.6%
Extrapolate 150 out to cover the whole of the town – let’s say times 1000, its that sort of size. That would give us 150,000 people in La Rochelle –
Harley Davidson convention
..rolled into town one day, and took up the whole harbour line to park. CLAIRE - thought Mr Miller might appreciate this one. fair enough. More worrying, is that we could then assume that we should multiply the 22 jumpers by 1000 – giving us a grand total of 22,000 blue and white stripey jumpers in La Rochelle. . Even more worrying is that there are at least another 100, 000 for sale in the shops.
Anyways – apart from the ‘zebra like’ haze of the fashion there, its actually a really lovely, relaxing place. We did indulge in a trip out to sea – only lasted 50 mins though – naturally not enough for mister Mac. One thing I must mention is that you can hire free yellow city bikes at multiple locations across town. Its part of an initiative of the town council aimed at freeing up the town centre traffic, and it seems to work OK. We borrowed a couple (of bikes) two days in a row, and I can recommend this as a great way of seeing the surrounding countryside and sea scape. We did get sore batties however, mainly due to our not-so-nifty Evil K'nevil manouvers outside the
edges of the cycle paths on the way out of town.
The old port entrance is gorgeous, especially at night, and we did get some good photos. There are two campsites – the good one was closed, and we checked the Municipal one about 2kms out of town. We didn’t fancy it though as it appeared to be in the middle of a housing estate, so, we did our usual and opted for the luxury of a 2 star hotel, which had a real nice ‘patchwork’ view over lots of roofs in the town.
Best things to eat in LR:
Crepe with blueberry jam (confiture) and crème. Mega.
97% cocoa chocolate from the chocalatier next to the market. Comes in sheets, like easter egg chocolate – lots of other types too, as this variety might be too strong for a lot of folksters.
Lovely beer in iced glasses by the sea on a hot day (it averaged 26 degrees while we were there).
Think that’ll do for tonight….. next time I’ll tell you about the card game that Alan and I have begun which is set to overtake our lives. Its called ‘Switch’, is
Eggs on wheels...
...on his bike, or off his trolley? highly competitive with lots of ‘nah nah’ factor, and we plan to keep a tally over the coming year of the scores of our games played. At the moment I’m definitely winning (of course I am – I’m writing the blog!) but we’re going to scrap the score and start in earnest on the flight to Bangkok. How sad are we? VERY.
Shazzawazza. xxxxx
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