Author: Franco

No Room at the Inn

Having determined to leave, the morning at Fanjeaux dawned blue. This, however, proved to be like a classic English false dawn in that it soon began to cloud over. We’d been invited for a coffee at the owners’ farm house

Posted in 2024 Summer

Time to Move

We’ve done our usual thing and stayed a little too long at Fanjeaux. The 2024 late spring/early summer weather continues to be unsettled in France, including southern France, and we have been treated to a series of skies that would

Posted in 2024 Summer

Fun with Flycatchers

This year’s spring and early summer (if you count this as summer before the solstice) has been famously atrocious, not only in the UK but in a lot of France as well. Although farmer Luc at Les Brugues, Fanjeaux, says

Posted in 2024 Summer

Rescuing an Empress

Any regular readers of this will know that I’ve been monitoring dragonflies and damselflies on this site for many years. It used to be an absolute haven for odonata. Following the admittance of a Koi Carp farmer many years ago,

Posted in 2024 Summer

Donzac to Fanjeaux

As we hadn’t begun by knowing where we’d end up yesterday, we weren’t initially sure where to head to today. Normally from here, there’d be no debate, we’d drop into Les Brugues at Fanjeaux, at least for a couple of

Posted in 2024 Summer

Frodo Throws a Tantrum

‘T was time to move on. We had originally intended to stay in Arçais for four days but, with our late lamented friend’s formalities over, we had stayed for eight, largely because the weather was favourable and we could now

Posted in 2024 Summer

The Changing Marsh

All went smoothly for our late, lamented friend’s celebration of life. We had intended to move on on Monday 10th but, since we have a very pleasant pitch on the pleasingly rural campsite in Arçais, and with the weather looking

Posted in 2024 Summer

A Gastronomic Day

It began with Francine getting excited about being able to do laundry. There is a washing machine on site but it requires le guardien also to be on site to kick it off; yesterday he wasn’t. Today was also sunny

Posted in 2024 Summer

Converging on Arçais

Here’s the reason we have been taking a rather convoluted route into Europe. We began by going through the Hook of Holland to north-eastern Netherlands to Havelte. Then we had to tack back west and south, more or less all

Posted in 2024 Summer

A Bad Detour

The Maison de la Nature was open today so we hopped back on our e-bikes to try the 11 kms from Rosnay. I’m still trying to get used to the 5 power levels of assistance available on my e-starli E28.

Posted in 2024 Summer