A sight for sore eyes…. January 22nd 2021

It’s been months since you’ve seen a picture of our boat, Olivia Rose, so here’s a picture to keep the memory alive, for me as much as for you.

The capitaine of the marina where Olivia is spending the winter on the Moselle in north eastern France was kind enough to send us this picture this week. It’s great to see her again.

Back down in our south western corner, the temperature is see-sawing about all over the place. We went from just above zero during the daytime to blue skies and 16 degrees in the space of a week, as the contrasting photos illustrate. Now we’ve got gales and rain, with gusts up to 85km per hour.

I thought I would share a few pictures of some of the more interesting buildings we come across as we’ve gone out on our walks over the last few months, the church above being my first example.

This next building is rather grander, a chateau in the next village taken back in the Autumn.

The rural farm building below is falling apart, but nature is taking over very gracefully. This type of construction is very common in this part of France, open fronted barns that look as if they built them and then forgot to finish off the front walls. Many of them are in a far worse state than this example.

And my last photo isn’t of a building at all. It was taken out of the car window as we drove around the outskirts of Tarbes, which has a small regional airport. This is a picture of something I’ve never seen before – an airport full of grounded planes, many more than you can see here, stacked up next to one another, and with nowhere to go. A bit like all of us.

And that’s about it for this week. We’ve been inundated with paperwork over the last few days, trying to sort out both health cover and the van. The latest request for information from the French equivalent of the NHS resulted in us sending in 34 pages of supporting documents and a four page letter to explain it all, all of it in French obviously. And getting the van registered is almost as bad. As a result my brain has exploded, hence short blog.  Normal service will be resumed next week!

Take care as ever. No video but I’ll finish with a picture of a rose from the vase on the kitchen table. A pocket of golden sunshine to cheer the spirits.

MJ