It wasn’t the best nights sleep we’ve ever had, although the tent floor was nice and level, the grass was good, the temperature was mild and the wind was quiet, a French family of about eight or ten that were staying in the mobile home opposite our pitch, had been out for the evening and had returned at about 3.30am. Their arrival was preceded by the manic barking of two local dogs, who obviously weren’t used to such a large tribe of merrily refreshed strangers walking up their road at this time of the morning. Once the family had stomped up the path next to our tent, they started shouting at each other, telling their children off and repeatedly slamming their door. Being English, we tutted a lot, and at one point even crossly turned our tent light on to check the time, I was so angry at the noise that I was about to open and close the tent zip a few times, but thankfully they’d managed to get themselves inside and the banging was now at least slightly muffled as they presumably started throwing their chairs around and randomly dropping saucepans on their hardwood floor. Kez was absolutely seething, she’d already taken a dislike to their cute 5 year old ‘bloody clog wearing holly hobby’ because of some hide-and-seek incident in the shower block, and she promised faithfully to give them her hardest stare in the morning and absolutely forbid me to say bonjour to them in the morning. If that wasn’t punishment enough, I decided I’d make morning coffee really loudly while they nursed their hangovers, but amazingly they were all up and running around before us, and as I staggered to the bread van while they which they were doing their best to empty, I couldn’t help but let go my by now fairly well practiced friendly morning ‘bonjour!’ Kez gave me her very best hard stare and I could only shrug ‘Well it was a Saturday night’.
The rest of the day was wonderful though, we decided to do the tourist thing and followed a historic walk around the town. Fifteenth century buildings, renaissance carvings, idyllic river paths and fountain cooled public gardens kept us entertained until late afternoon. We treated ourselves to a few beers and a couple of wonderful cakes from the most decadent shelf of a pretty little patisserie.
Later, on a mission to find something to cook for dinner, and emboldened by the earlier booze we decided to queue up in the busy boucherie and managed to purchase a couple of nice looking chunks of veal, which we later cooked with peppers, tomatoes, onion and garlic.
A really pleasant Sunday.