… from Saturday night’s sleepover.
Leaving Calais I drove for a couple of hours and parked up at about 03:00 just short of Rouen on a motorway rest area.
And probably one of the best nights’ sleeps I have ever had. Totally painless and I’ll stop here again!
From here it was straight down the motorway through the depressing weather all the way to near Nantes and from there down to Fromentine.
Not a hiccup along the way (I hope that I was sticking to the limit when I drove past the Kojak with a Kodak) except at Rouen where I ended up in some kind of mayhem around the old harbour
We had marching bands, tall ships and all that kind of rubbish and it took hours to extract myself from the chaos.
When are they going to build a flaming by-pass around that blasted place?
At Frometine I arrived, would you believe, in the middle of a brocante.
And what a brocante it was – there wasn’t anything for sale under about €100. I really do think that some people have taken leave of their senses when it comes to valuing their possessions.
A bit of good luck, though – the second-hand bookshop was open so I bought a few more history books.
That’s one thing that I’m finding with raiding a few of these bookshops – that there are huge gaps in the British version of European history that can only be filled by a French perspective on things.
So far, I’ve bought a huge volume on the Hundred Years War, a couple of books on The Battle of the Rail – the fight of the French cheminots against the SS during the crucial 10 days after D-Day and today, a book on the Allied invasion of Provence.
These are all events that British historians simply gloss over, and it’s nice to read about these events from another point of view.
There’s a pizza place in Fromentine, run by a woman who comes from Morlaix, a town in Finisterre where I spent a few relaxing weeks back in 1976 or something.
She made me a nice vegan pizza (good job that I was prepared with my vegan cheese) – after all, it is Sunday – and then I went off to my spec from the other week to pass the night.
I’ve an early sail in the morning.
