Nous arrivons

At last, after a long and arduous journey, we arrive at Chaillac-sur-Vienne, near St Junien on the Vienne river. Last night the thunderstorm broke as predicted, but our tent held out against the worst the tempest could throw at us, and I actually had the least disturbed night's sleep so far. A relatively early start and cool day made for an ideal 'short' cycle of 40 km or so. However, the route that I had chosen (to avoid the dual carriageway and motorway) seemed to transpose us into Devon and Cornwall, so that it felt like an Audax around Gwithian rather than a meander along the rivers of the Charente. The plan was to ride straight to St Junien where we would have a leisurely dejeuner and call the gîte owner to arrange a convenient meeting time, but at 30 km the single banana and pastry from the patisserie had worn off and we were reduced to scoffing the last of the Jordan's cereal bars, a peach and some old baguette which S had luckily stuffed under a bungee on her rear rack. Suitably fortified we continued onwards and made it to a kebab shop just as the gas ran out - so lunch was burger and chips. After that kicked in I called the gîte owner - now I don't know about you, but my French is pretty basic though passable, and I can construct a GCSE O-level sentence and guess the reply from recognising the odd word and contextualising; but this guy must have had the French equivalent of a Glaswegian accent because I didn't have a clue what he was saying. For example, 'gîte' was one word which I was pretty confident of pronouncing correctly and which, as you can imagine, figured fairly largely in my conversation. But he pronounced it 'jeez'. No doubt, someone will write in with the correct explanation or berate me for my linguistic ineptitude, but regardless, by a curious form of telephonic semaphore I managed to arrange a meeting for 3 pm. Amazingly this worked and were met at the appointed time by our host in his Renault van (he had clearly been driving around looking for us because, as it transpired, his own gaff was only 50 m down the road).

I won't bore you with the details of our trip to LeClerc supermarché - we are here, and S is cooking les moules as I write this entry . . .