Tag Archives: rocroi

Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

… for tea tonight was actually quite good.

There’s room for improvement of course but bearing in mind that this is the first one that I’ve made since I was living in Reyers more than 25 years ago, it was by no means disappointing.

There wasn’t enough filling, but that’s a minor problem. There’s enough food left nevertheless to make two more meals so it’s just as well that it worked.

What I did was to put some lentils in the slow cooker and slowly bring them to the boil. Then they were rinsed and put back in with clean water and some basil, oregano and tarragon. Mind you, I almost forgot to rinse them and had to leave my comfortable bed to do that.

Later on this afternoon I added some bulghour and later still, because there was still plenty of water, I added some porridge oats to soak it up and stiffen the mix.

At teatime I fried an onion and garlic with more of the herbs, added my mix from the slow cooker and some tomato concentrate, then layered alternate layers of pasta sheet and my cooked mix, topped it off with a thick cheese sauce and baked it in the oven, and away we went.

During the night I went away too. So much so that for a change just recently I wasn’t up before the alarm. It awoke me with a start when it went off but I didn’t hang around at all in bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone notes. And I really Had been away. Back at Hogwarts at one point too during the night with HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE seeing the kids at their dance. Ron had split up from Lavender Brown. There was another girl there who was sulking for some reason or other. Ron went to ask her to dance but she replied “they aren’t playing our tune”. All her friends told him to leave her alone. Just then the music started to play it so a couple of people went to dance her and missed. She moved away. I don’t know what happened to Ron and this girl then but Hermione was there dancing with someone whom I didn’t know when the dance floor collapsed. They carried on dancing and it looked as if they would dance into the ladies’ lavatory. Someone just coming out of the door said to hermione “do you want some paper as well?”. It all was very strange.

Back in Harry Potter again later and there was something about spying on someone’s house. It was very difficult to do. There was a fallen tree with its branches and we had to hide ourselves in the fallen tree’s branches to do it. We piled into a car and set out to drive. There was a lot of traffic and I was weaving in and out of it and almost had a collision with someone. They went in front of me and put their brakes on to slow down so I did too. We had a slow drive with all the traffic on the road. We came to Barbridge where there was a fallen tree in the middle of the road. I said to the others “lock your doors and hang on because this is a trap” thinking that someone had cut down the tree for it to fall across the road to stop us and ambush us when we left the vehicle to see what was happening.

Later still I’d seen an AC Cobra for sale in the local newspaper so Laurence and I went round to see it with Roxanne. It was somewhere off nantwich Road in Crewe so we eventually managed to find the house. We walked straight into the house without knocking. We found the car in a downstairs room covered by a blanket. First of all my taxi detector wouldn’t work. Then I realised that an AC Cobra wouldn’t have been a taxi anyway. Found the guy and his wife sitting in a room next door, not in the least perturbed by the fact that we were in their house. We went back into the room and began to look around at this vehicle. He told me that he wanted £30,000 for it, which I thought was cheap. But that turned out to be the deposit to take it for a test drive – it was really £250,000. There was no way that I could afford that. I pretended that I was interested and got down to look underneath it. It was quite badly rotten around the edges. I thought to myself “he’s asking for a lot of money for something in this kind of condition. Even if I were to buy it, I didn’t have the mobility to crawl around underneath it with welding tackle etc these days. There’s no way that I could consider this vehicle” but I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d had a good look around to find out what else was wrong.

I was back in this dream again later on and we were leaving. Down at the bus station was a bus going to Mold. We were saying our goodbyes but the driver prepared to close the doors. This woman and I ran to the door and scrambled aboard. We had a look for the guy who was with us but he wasn’t on board. By now the bus had set off. I thought “never mind. We’re on here and Roxanne is on here”. I asked for two and a half to Mold. he smiled and said “I’m not going to Mold”. “Well, take us to wherever you’re going”. He gave me two and a half tickets which came to 11/-. The first thing that I did was seeing as I had some money ready I said that I’d give him the shilling but it was a £10 note. Then I had a 10/- note for him. He looked at me and asked “is that correct?”. I suddenly realised that I’d done, took the £10 note back and gave him 1/-. I went to sit down and to worry about contacting the other guy later. There were 2 boys on the bus who made some kind fo remark about me handing over a £10 note and how did I spot it from that distance? I replied “when you reach a certain age you don’t look at the money, you can smell the difference between the notes.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent on Day Two of my 2017 trip to North America and the page is practically finished. However, we did hit an obstruction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one thing always leads to another, and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

The subject of Marguerite de Bourgeoys cropped up on that web page.

She was a big friend of Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal and she was on one of the very first emigrant voyages to Nouvelle France where she occupied herself with spiritual works and the welfare of the filles du roi, the young girls from orphanages who were sent out to become brides for the soldiers who remained there to settle after having been discharged from the army.

They both came from Troyes which was on my shuttle route between Virlet and Brussels so on the very last time that I drove the route, instead of doing it overnight as I usually did, I took a whole week and visited every place of interest that I could find along the way.

One of the places that I visited was the family home of the Chomedeys and I found all of my photos. But seeing as Troyes is such a beautiful old town I took dozens of photos of many old house and I couldn’t remember which one was his.

No trace of the notes that I made, which was a surprise – especially as they were written up from the following day all the way back to Virlet.

In the end, I had to dive back into the bowels of the back-up disk and find the dictaphone recordings from the journey and re-transcribe the notes for the relevant day and mate them to the photos.

That’s another project that I’ll have to do one of these days. The road between the Belgian border at Rocroi and down to Nevers is one of the most beautiful and historic in all of France. I had a plan that when I was stuck for something to do (whenever that might be) I’d pick a long road like that, explore it thoroughly and write a book about it.

The TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY was done in 2010, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and I’m doing Version 2.0 even as we speak.

After that, I wrote a pile of stuff about Lanouiller and de Bécancour’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montreal and the city of Québec and all the way down the “Forgotten Coast” as far as it’s possible to go.

The road between Rocroi and Nevers was to be the third of the trilogy but ill-health and feeling sorry for myself somehow conspired to get in the way of all of my plans.

Someone else for whom I was feeling sorry for was the physiotherapist. He came by at 17:00 to tell me that he’s busy and will be back at 19:30. That was a major inconvenience, disrupting my evening like that and I made sure that he knew.

Rosemary phoned me at lunchtime and we had another one of our marathon chats that go on for ever. She’s being swept up by the turn of events and it’s not easy for “a stranger in a strange land” to deal with some of the things that go on. It’s not something that bothers me too much because I couldn’t care less, but Rosemary is much more sensible and focused than I ever am.

After she hung up, I went for a shower to clean myself up ready for His Nibs to come round and put me through my paces

As I mentioned earlier, tea was delicious. And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have to nip into town which will do me good. And then I have to carry on with Canada 2017 and sort out the mess that will be Trans-Labrador Highway Version 2.0

So once I finish that I’ll have to do Rocroi-Nevers next, then carry on with the Arctic stuff, go back and carry on with the Emigrant Trails stuff, organise the Grand Banks trips and probably 1000 other things too.

Never mind anything else – I’m far too busy to die right now.

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Friday 1st April 2016 – I’M BACK …

… on the road again today. I was awake early enough but when I switched on the laptop, there was someone on line with whom I wanted to have a chat. Consequently it was about 09:30 when I went downstairs and I hit the road straight away.

My first stop was at the town of Ramillies, the site in 1706 of one of the major, if not decisive battles of the War of the Spanish Succession. And it was here that I realised that I had forgotten my mobile phone and camera. Still, start as you mean to go on, I suppose.

Instead, I went shopping at the Delhaize at Inhout so as to stock up with food for my couple of days, and here I received a lovely smile from a young girl. I suppose that I’ll have to add it to the list of places to revisit. After all, it’s not every day that I have such a nice smile like that and I need to remember these places.

I called at a nursery on the outskirts of Namur. Alison is a very keen gardener and I want to thank her for being so kind to me, so I managed to pick up a young almond tree that will look really nice when it starts to blossom. I hope that she’ll like it.

Fuel at Namur was a mere €0:97 per litre, which is the cheapest that I’ve seen it for about 15 years. Caliburn was running quite low and so I profited by fuelling him right up, as I’m sure you would have done too at that price.

I missed the turning that I wanted at Namur and ended up on the wrong side of the Meuse – the eastern bank which is quite industrialised. It took me ages to find a crossing over onto the western bank, by which time I reckon that I had missed all of the picturesque hotels. but not to be outdone, I carried on southwards to Dinant, where the streets were undergoing a total renovation. There was nowhere to park, nowhere to move around, and walking around the town didn’t look very easy at all.

As a result, I pressed on towards the frontier, stopping for my butty somewhere where there was a lovely view across the river. Having no answer at a couple of bed-and-breakfasts, and at yet another, being told that it was full and I should refer myself to the other two in the town.And so I eventually found myself across the French border, in Givet. The first hotel that I found had transformed its rooms into apartments.The prices at the next few that I found frightened me to death and so as a last resort I found myself at the Ibis Budget on the outskirts of the town. I had no luck here either as the computerised registration system was down.

From here, I decided to cut across country to Rocroi where I knew that there were a few cheap hotels, but instead, negotiating the narrow one-way streets of Givet I found another hotel, the “Reflets Jaunes”. They were busy too and all of the cheap rooms had gone, but when I moaned about the price they allowed me a 20% discount which made it much more like my kind of place. There was secure vehicle parking too round the corner which was very handy because the streets weren’t half narrow.

Once I’d installed myself, I crashed out for an hour or so and then had a shower and washed my clothes. And I do have to say that I wasn’t disappointed with my hotel. I’ve been obliged to decline breakfast because it’s so expensive, although had I been a meat-and-dairy eater, I wouldn’t have complained for a moment because it really did look excellent, the way the receptionist described it. But the room is nice, warm and comfortable, and the towels are so fluffy that I’ve no idea how I’m going to close my suitcase when I leave here. The shower is lovely too and the internet connection is superb.

Later on in the evening, I went to see what there was to eat. There are several fritkots in the town but none of them sell falafel from what I was able to see. One was however next to a Carrefour “City” so while my chips were frying, I went next door and bought a cucumber salad to have with the chips.

After tea, I started to watch an Inspector Hornleigh film but my heart wasn’t in it and I’d gone in about 15 minutes. I’m definitely noticing how much I’m struggling now so I hope that the next few days will start to see a slight improvement in my health. It’ll be three weeks since I will have had a blood transfusion.

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Friday 9th May 2014 – I WAS RIGHT …

caliburn overnight parking spot couvin ardennes belgium… about the sleep issues last night – but not by very much. Although it did take a while to get off to sleep, once I did finally drop off I remember nothing whatsoever until about 07:15 when I woke upto find my little spec here as deserted as the Mary Celeste.

Mind you, it’s not quite true that I remember nothing. In fact I was being interviewed by the local tax inspector who professed total astonishment that my outgoings were exactly the same as my incomings, before any allowance for food and other such personal expenses. I had to explain that some of the outgoings were notional outgoings, that quite often I was fed at work, and that I really was living on the breadline, giving them a tour of my apartment in Jette and showing them the repairs.

So on with the motley today and this is where I start work.

The road between the Belgian border here near Rocroi and Nevers in the Bourgogne is one of the best in the world. It has everything, except the St Lawrence of course, but it also has loads of history and we pass through one of the most devastating battlefields of the war. Not the Somme, or Ieper, or Verdun, but the Marne where the French held off the Germans for four years.

unfinished motorway abandoned couvin belgium rocroi franceIt also has abandoned motorways.

Well, not really abandoned, but in the late 1990s the French built this superb 10-km stretch of motorway to bypass Rocroi and brought it all the way to the Belgian border, and here it sits because the Belgians won’t extend it.

It really is the Road to Nowhere.


fortifications rocroi franceThe town of Rocroi is interesting, though.

This part of France has always been the cockpit of Europe with invading armies from everywhere crossing back and forth. Many of the nobles fortified their houses and the local churches and even a few hills, and so the King of France ordered a fortified city to be built here.

fortifications rocroi franceIt’s a typical star-shaped fortress and contrary to what people might think, it’s not a Vauban fortress because it was built in the mid 16th Century, over 100 years before he was born. Nevertheless, he did come here and make a few improvements to the original design.

The fortifications are still almost complete today, and that’s quite astonishing. Some has fallen down and a couple of modern gateways have been pierced through, but nothing, apart from the original narrow gates, seems to have been demolished.

abandoned railway line rimogne tremblois les rocroi franceAbout 10 kms outside the town, the main road passes over a culvert that I have always been convinced was a former railway line.

One of the tasks of today was to track it down and sure enough, here it is. A local yokel (who was not a very vocal local yokel unfortunately) told me that it ran to Rimogne where there were important slate quarries. He remembers it as a boy but it’s been closed for years now.

palais de justice rethel franceWinding my way through the Ardennes I come to the town of Rethel.

This is a beautiful little town on the banks of the Aisne with plenty of history. And you might think that the history is reflected in the old buildings here. But in many cases you might be wrong because much of the town and some of the “historic” buildings date from no earlier than 1920, and some from 1945.

town hall rethel franceThe town hall here for example, is from the early 1930s

In 1914 at the start of World War I the town was burnt down (it’s not just in Canada that this happens) and the invading German soldiers did the rest. Rethel was one of the major German garrison towns behind the front line of the Marne battlefields.

In 1940 the town was smashed by General Guderian’s Panzers who passed this way on their race to the coast and then to the Swiss frontier.

cadsar euroluz sugar beet rethel franceThe high Champagne plateau is famous for its sugar beet and its wind turbines. There are dozens of each all over the place, and here is one of the bigger sugar beet plants. It’s owned by CADSAR EUROLUZ, whoever they might be, and you can see some wind turbines in the background.

It makes quite an impressive photograph, which is no surprise, as it’s an impressive building in quite an impressive setting.

6 way roundabout high champagne plateau franceYou’ll all know of this roundabout because I’ve talked about this quite often. It’s on what is the highest point of the plateau and 6 roads come into it. It’s here that we turn south, direction Chalons.

What is remarkable about it is that it is here that the air changes. Standing up on the top here you can feel the difference in the air – to the north and west it’s all claggy and oppressive but to the south it’s a lost fresher and a lot more inspiring in the same way that the air in North America is. It’s something that I can’t explain.

german military cemetery world war one st etienne a arnes franceFinal stop is one of the biggest German war cemeteries in Northern France. Over 12,000 soldiers, and more arrive each year as they are exhumed from farmland, are in here, four to a grave. There are quite a few Jewish graves and also quite a few soldiers with Polish names because, don’t forget, Poland didn’t exist at this period and was partitioned between German, Austria and Russia

There are probably a few French names in here too because Alsace-Lorraine was part of Germany at this time and soldiers from there were conscripted into the German army.

view battlefield marne american war memorial sommepy tahure franceSo tonight I’m at the American war memorial at Blanc Mont. This is one of the highest points on the Marne front line and was heavily fortified by the Germans. There are still the remains of trenches here. The hill was stormed by the Americans under Pershing at the beginning of October 1918 and the Germans pushed back.

And as you might expect, the monument is closed for repair so it can’t be visited. No surprise there, is there?

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