Huge driving day ahead of us today (Saturday). It is Mayday, and the French are on holiday. No shops open, so Jude, ever-so-wisely, suggested a shop (verb) for food on Friday. Good call. Well-provisioned, we set off in our Megane, named 'Morgana' now, full steam ahead, for Beynac, a good 5 to 7 hours away. We set our TomTom up and headed off. Simple. Follow the directions and all is sweet.
Now did I mention that there are two Beynacs? No, I didn't. But there are. Ever so fortunately, they are almost in a direct line from Troyes to the one we wanted, so we didn't lose much time, but boy were we glad it wasn't the other one where we were to be staying for the next two weeks. Lovely in it's own way, the wrong one was a suburb (pretty suburb) of Limoges. I am sure the inhabitants are very happy with it, but I also bet that there aren't too many French who make it a oliday destination!
Our Beynac is absolutely wonderful. Youse will have to wait for a later post to hear about it, though, because this one is for the trip.
My friend Gavin Frawley has a trick he uses on bush walking trips when some marvellous creature appears before us (eg lyre bird, wombat, goanna, sparrow). He rather amusingly holds his hand over his mouth, in 'air microphone' attitude and pretends to be calling in the critter for our pleasure and enjoyment. As if he is controlling it. Works a treat, I can tell you. Anyway, we had a couple of such moments during our drive.
The first was a town market that was in full swing. We stopped here at Varzy and had a wander among the stalls that filled the narrow streets up one side of the town hill and down the other side. Brilliant! All sorts of cheeses, sausages, fruits and vegies, meats, foi gras, flowers and mattresses. Yes, mattresses. This, I felt, was pushing entrepreneurship a little too far. Who knows, the chap may well have made quite a killing on the day! (it is said that the French are not good at entrepreneurship. They don't even have a word for it!).
The next Gavin Frawley 'call-down' moment came when we found ourselves in the middle of a cycle race! Flooding memories of our cycling buddies, including Gav, were ignited. Here, first, were the back-markers; next the pannetoni (I know, it's really called the peleton) and then the first to go. There were the cheering crowds waving banners (mums and dads really) and the marshalls with paddles raised to cars like ours that needed to slow/alter their speed/direction. Eventually we peeled away and were able to resume our route. Fabulous!
For a couple of hours we scorched along a motorway that let us wind up to 130+ KM/hr. Boy did we hoot along then! Morgana really let fly, though still there were cars passing us at what must have been 150! Very exciting, though a little TOO much pepper for Jude!
We reached our Beynac at around 7:00 pm and were completely gob-smacked. I'll tell you about that later. In the mean time, we gotta get rambing, cos we are rambling kinds of people!
YBPs
The Rambing Roses!
No comments:
Post a Comment