Week in the Life day 3

I had a couple of phone calls to make this morning.  I have a difficult relationship with the phone, for some unfathomable reason, I hate it!  I’d much rather email!  I don’t use my mobile phone much as a phone, more as a portable radio!

I decided to wear these brown linen trousers today.  I love this top – I have had it for ages, it really needs throwing away now.

I had a friend round for coffee and I completely forgot to get a photo!  But we sat in the conservatory and as she is a keen gardener too, we wandered round my garden.

Then I drove over to Mum’s to take her shopping.  We went to a big out of town Marks and Spencers and Tescos

My favourite photo of the day:

That;s my garden shoe he has!  He loves to take a shoe down the garden and have us chase him.  What joy!

Week in the Life–concentrating on the everyday…

Early morning routine, my windowsill is my makeup counter!

 

By my bed side, Lynda Bellingham’s autobiography (she is definately not as you would think!), and a pile of books waiting to be read.

On top of the pile of books is my CD player and radio usually tuned in to radio 2, and my messy bedside table.

The weather was awful today, very grey and dark!  Hence this dark photo of the main Post Office where I queued for ages waiting to post a parcel.

My new ‘Cath Kidston’ lookalike bag, purchased from the market!  And my beloved birkenstock shoes, which are unfortunately looking very scruffy now.  Time for a new pair I think.

Self portraits while cooking dinner!  I put the camera on my little compost container on the self timer.  What fun!

While the dog sleeps…..

Week in the Life

I have decided to participate in Ali Edwards project this time.  I am also taking part in another simplify101 course, this time it’s time management!  So for the first week I have to log my time – how neat that this coincides with Week in the Life!

 

Here’s a sneak peek at my Monday:

Trying to look smart for my first training session at CAB.  (I am training to be a gateway assessor for Citizen’s Advice Bureau)

A healthy lunch in front of a not-so-healthy computer!

My afternoon job was to put weedkiller down on the drive

Coffee time!

I know I am going to find that I spend far too much time doing this:

 

A lovely evening for a walk along to the yacht club.

Vacances en France part3

Riding back to Normandy was very wet – again!  So we just stopped for a photo at Mont St Michel.  It was absolutely heaving with tourists despite the weather.  We will have to put it on our list to come back.

Luckily the rain stopped as we approached the town of Arromanches.  One problem with this weather is the faffing and messing about we have to do when we get off the bike!  Off come the overboots, the leggings, the helmets, some of it goes in the top box, some of it we carry!  Several times Maurice mentioned that next time we’ll come in the little sports car he has promised himself!

We visited the D-Day museum at Arromanches, where the ‘Mulberry Harbour’ was built for the troops landing on D-Day.  It was fascinating and we were amazed at the scale!  Here’s Maurice sitting on the sea wall, and way in the distance you can see the remains of that harbour.  It was massive!

We rode along the coast to Omaha beach where the Americans landed, and visited the American Cemetary.  Again, it is the scale that hits you!

We stayed at a wonderful French B&B, where we shared another evening meal (table d’hote) with 4 other guests and the hosts.  It was a fantastic meal – very much based on cider and apples, a local speciality, and of course the meal took all evening!  With the help of copious wine, we managed to have quite a conversation with their little English and our little French!

 

On our final morning we visited the Bayeux Tapestry.  Wow!  How awesome!  It is 70 metres of sheer delight!  It tells the story of William the Conqueror and Harold King of England.  1066 and all that.  We loved it!

 

Our final stop was at Honfleur for lunch, and a few last photos. There was a vintage Citroen rally – very atmospheric!  Honfleur is one of the prettiest harbours along the north coast, and is full of lovely little restaurants and cafes.

And then we rode off into the sunset back to Dieppe for our ferry home!  All in all a great week, some 1,200 miles, and what a lot we did!

Vacances en France Part 2

 

We arrived in South Brittany after about 7 hours travelling!  Mostly in the wet, and my trousers had leaked! 

A word or two about the satnav!  Maurice spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with routes and via points!  But, it did invariably get us to the correct place without too much bother.  It just had a weird sense of which was the quickest way sometimes, sending us down tiny country lanes or straight through the middle of towns instead of a lovely smooth bypass!

We stayed with another English couple at Le Petite Charrue.  It would be easy to say that we were boring and not very adventurous staying with English people in France!  But in our defence, we don’t speak much French (I have schoolgirl c1975 French, Maurice has none!), and it turned out to be really interesting talking to these English people who have made their lives in France.

The next day was the reason we had come all the way to Brittany.  We started the morning looking around La Roche Bernard:

And then we had lunch and spent the rest of the day with my old school friend Rachel, and her delightful husband Herve.  Rachel and I were best friends when we were about 12, but then her family moved away.  We have kept in touch for 40 years!  We haven’t seen each other very much during that time, I think the last time we met was about 20 years ago!  Herve is holding their gorgeous little grandson Gabriel here.  Rachel and Herve are professional folk musicians, you can see their website here.

We spent the rest of our time in Brittany riding round the Golfe de Morbihan, a vast inlet with hundreds of little coves and inlets, and some beautiful little fishing villages.  We visited Carnac where there are hundreds of neolithic stones all lined up in some formation depicting the movement of the sun and moon.

We also visited the main town of the region – Vannes, with it’s lovely medieval centre

Now we were on our way home, so we rode back towards Dieppe stopping for 1 more night near Bayeux (Part 3)

Vacances en France! Part 1

 

We’ve just back from 1 week in France on the motorbike.  We caught the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, and stayed in Normandy for the first few days.

 

We stayed with a lovely couple at Le Chat Chocolat near the small town of Forges-Les-Eaux.  We visited a lovely chateau at Vascoueil, which had a lovely sculpture garden:

The highlight of our time in Normandy was our visit to Lau, my friend from www.simplify101.com!  We have been on several online classes together, so it was lovely to meet for real!  Here she is with her lovely family (and me!)

After a gorgeous lunch she took us around her city of Rouen for a tour.  It is a very beautiful place!

 

Here is a splendid view of Rouen cathedral and the city from one of the surrounding hills.

That day was a beautiful warm sunny day.  Alas!  The rest of our holiday was not!  It rained and was cold!  Not the best weather for biking.  Never mind, we carried on, and the next day visited Monet’s Garden at Giverny.  We really loved it!  It was quite a thrill to actually be there in such an iconic place.

We had heard that there was a World War II site nearby.  It was a German V1 bomb launching site, so we made our way there.  It was a small clearing in a forest, this actual site had been bombed and was never operational, but had been kept in it’s original state.  The fact that the weather was so miserable and wet, and all the tall trees about, gave the site a really eerie feel.  Here’s a V1 bomb on it’s launch pad pointing directly at London!

 

The next day we set off for Brittany (Part 2), in the pouring rain!  We hadn’t realised quite how big France is, and suddenly realised that it was like going down to Cornwall from here – a very long way!  Luckily the roads in France are much better than ours and not so busy, so no traffic jams or hold ups!