J’ai trouvé temps perdu! C'était en Charroux

Weather: Hot, hot, hot.  Bit of a spat over whether blinds should be shut in early morning to block sun or open to allow more air.  Time for home!

Clermont-Ferrand to Munster

Made the most of the map on loan at reception to do a lovely bike ride round ye olde quainty French villages near our site just NE of Clermond-ferrand.  First hill took us up to first chateau, closed on Tuesdays(it was Tuesday, of course) but nice pic-nic spot outside old village school.  Then we chugged on to what was billed as “probably the most beautiful village in France”; Charroux.  Spotted a very posh salon de the on the edge of the village which did delicious cakes and then we would have moved on unmoved by the village except that the owner of the S de T asked if we’d been up to the house of clocks.  Apparently this guy used to collect any old clocks mechanisms from big clocks and got them going.  He kept his collection in his little house in what turned out to be the old part of what was certainly a very pretty French village if not the most beautiful.

So on to village no 3 then 4 but by village 5 we had resorted to looking at the pictures on the information boards rather than cycling the extra metres to the chateaux/church/whatever.  And village no 6 was completely by-passed.  We had to stop at a DIY store at the village where the campsite was and it had a very tempting display of gardens chairs.  I resisted because if I had sat down it would have taken several assistants to get me up again and I would have left the chairs unpleasantly damp with sweat!

We’re now 3 steps from home on the German border in a pleasant town called Munster that does exceedingly good cakes and today we took the train to Colmar, another pleasant town that does cakes but that is also very full of tourists. 

 Two of our last stops on the way home are a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Firstly we’ll stop at a vineyard near Westhalten on the Alsace wine route.  We can park overnight there and last time it cost us €5 for the van overnight but over €300 after we’d paid for a 7 course meal and some cases of wine!!

And our last stop before home will be Amiens, home of a very interesting cathedral but more importantly home of macaroons.

So we found lost summer weather in Spain, eventually, and lost time in Charroux in France.  A good result for 4 months of very pleasant searching but the best bit by far for me was our week in L’Escala with my wonderful family!!