… that I went home.

I was dreading what I was going to find when I returned, and with a mouse loose in the attic I feared the worst. In the middle of winter too, and an Auvergnat one at that.

But I really must have made a pact with the devil or something because although it was cold at night, the days were like spring days – plenty of sunshine non-stop from morning until night and the batteries were always fully-charged by 11:00.

There was accordingly more than enough power to run the ash-sucker, and that made short work of the mess. I gave the table a really good scrub too so that looks okay, and with some of the tidying-up that I did, it looks much better than it has for a while.

The cold wasn’t a issue either because I had had the foresight to bring a huge pile of wood up last year. That was now nice and dry and the attic heated up in seconds once I fired up the woodstove. What a good buy that was!

All in all, while I can’t see me going back to live there full-time now, I had a satisfactory stay there and I’m glad that I did it.

But returning to our moutons, as the French say, I dunno what happened at all last night. I was in bed quite early as I said, and I was soon asleep. But I awoke again at about midnight when the alarm went off – I knew that it was a mistake to put new batteries into the clock here and I wish that I could remember now how to switch off the alarm. But I did notice that with the fire on last night the temperature in here reached 26.3°C. That’s not bad for December.

I must have gone back to sleep again, but it wasn’t for long. I’ve no idea what time it was that I awoke but after tossing and turning around in bed for ages and ages, I went for a stroll down the corridor and noted that it was 06:20. And that was that – I couldn’t go back to sleep.

It wasn’t as if anything had awoken me either. No beastie scratching away at the roof or anything like that. It’s rather a disappointment when I was hoping for an early night ready to hit the road this afternoon.

After breakfast I started to load up Caliburn and then tidied up in the attic and gave everything a good once-over. By the time that I had finished, it was just before 12:00 and so I thought to myself “sod it” and we hit the road.

An anxious moment while I couldn’t remember where I had put the key to my room in Leuven, but I found that and off we set.

A stop for lunch at 14:00 on a motorway service station near Cosne sur Loire, and then I drove on northwards.

Now here’s a thing.

We have had beautiful, glorious weather down in the Auvergne but suddenly, as I hit Dordives, a bank of fog came rolling across the motorway. And the temperature plummeted in minutes from 13.8°C to 7.1°C.

From then on, all the way northwards, this was what it was like, and I’m glad that it hadn’t been like this back at home.

And doesn’t Strawberry Moose take a good photo?

We hit the usual problems on the Francilienne, all the way along and it got worse because my hotel, the Akena Hotel which is another Budget chain at €46:00 that I have yet to try, is in the middle of a centre commerciale, a shopping centre at Claye-Souilly and I arrived at chucking-out time.

It was freezing here with the fog, and the receptionist told me that it had been like this all day here too.

It took a while to sort out the heating and after my pizza had come, I had a shower. And now I’m off to bed, ready for part II of my journey.

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