Category: 2012 Spring

Heading Home

This is the weekend when most of France seems to get up, take to their vehicles and head off on their holiday/vacation. Comme d’habitude [as usual], it is also the weekend that we start heading home. Fortunately, most of France

Posted in 2012 Spring

Augmenting Guillaume’s Library

Thursday and Friday have been days spent putzing about in relatively brief intervals between showers/downpours. The most productive of our putzes was a trip down to the étang de Cistude just beyond Mézières-en-Brenne. Here there is a boardwalk and pathways

Posted in 2012 Spring

The Pinail

I think we are destined not to see the Réserve Naturelle du Pinail [Pinail Trail] at its best. We dropped in for our inaugural visit last year and, though we weren’t too disappointed – it produced our first ever Green-eyed

Posted in 2012 Spring

Spotting Emeralds

My fellow dragonfly spotting e-contact lives outside the Parc Naturel Régional de la Brenne but uses it to run the occasional dragonfly tour. So, he’s very familiar with the park and some of its more fruitful locations. He actually uses

Posted in 2012 Spring

Back to La Brenne

As we’ve learned on a couple of occasions, when you lose friends that have been around you during a visit somewhere, they leave and you tend to feel like Billy Nomates – you might as well leave yourself and go

Posted in 2012 Spring

B-Day

Many years ago, I mused about the fact that there was one law in England that you had no way of knowing that you were breaking – the drink driving law. It’s legal to have <80mg/ltr of alcohol in one’s

Posted in 2012 Spring

Un Printemps Catastrophique?

In other words, “a disastrous spring?” We arrived here in the Marais Poitevin, just inland from La Rochelle about half way down France’s west coast, on Monday. On Tuesday we went on a very pleasant, mostly sunny 15mls/24kms promenade à

Posted in 2012 Spring

A Grand Day Out

About 18 months ago, one of my UK dragonfly enthusiast contacts helped me out (not for the first time and certainly not the last) with the identification of a (to me) confusing specimen in France. At the same time, he

Posted in 2012 Spring

Les Tourbières de Vendoire

Les tourbières de Vendoire lie in the Périgord vert region, north-west of the gastronomically famous town of Périgueux – truffle country. La tourbe is French for peat and les tourbières are peat diggings. Those near the village of Vendoire were

Posted in 2012 Spring

Fanjeaux: Considered Impressions

We’ve been ensconced here for three weeks now, almost long enough to take root and it’s beginning to feel like home. To be perfectly honest, because we like the place so much and are so familiar with it, it feels

Posted in 2012 Spring