Tag Archives: troyes

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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Monday 12th May 2014 – I DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING …

… like as good a night’s sleep last night. But that’s because the bed collapsed in the middle of the night. I thought that it was all too good to be true. I carried out a few hasty repairs and we’ll have to see what that gives. I hope I can make it home without too much trouble – much as I love Caliburn, I don’t want to sleep for the next few nights in his cab.

So after breakfast I headed off to Troyes again and lost my way again. But in the end I did manage to work out how come. Troyes is actually two centres – the old original centre and the newer Medieval centre, and they each have a ring road and so it’s like a figure 8 – and that’s what makes it so complicated.

parking place troyes franceAfter much ado, I ended up back where I had left Caliburn yesterday as parking there is free, so another motorist told me. I may just as well have stayed there last night for all the good my meaderings did me.

And what a beautiful place it would have been to stay, too. If this is the kind of thing that you see at a free car park, just imagine what it’s going to be like in the touristy bit.

quai de la prefecture troyes franceAnd if they call Chalons the “Venice of Champagne”, what on earth do they call Troyes? Because it has 10 times as many water courses flowing through it and they are all much more impressive than what you see at Chalons.

Where I parked Caliburn was right by a canal of course, and this view , the quai de la Prefecture, is only a few hundred metres away

historic troyes half timbered houses franceTroyes though is a fascinating city and it’s probably one of the prettiest places to visit if you are, like me, a fan of medieval architecture.

There’s all kinds of wooden wattle-and-daub half-timbered houses here and it’s very easy to picture Coventry as looking like this in the 1920s before the planners and the Luftwaffe started to become involved in Coventry’s development.

half timbered houses modern centre troyes franceBut as you see, the presence of old medieval architecture hasn’t interrupted the modern progress of Troyes, despite what Donald Gibson (ptah!) might have told us.

What Gibson and his planners did to Coventry in the name of “progress” was nothing short of criminal when you consider how other cities have successfully integrated their historic buildings into modern 20th-Century lifestyles.

basilique st urbain troyes franceAs well as the Cathedral, Troyes has dozens of other churches including this one, the Basilique de St Urbain.

The Urbain in question is he who went on to be Pope Urban IV. He was born here – not in the church but in a house on the site of the church. His remains were brought back here in the 1930s and interred in the choir but I couldn’t find any trace of this, and the woman who was on duty here knew nothing, and gave the impression that she didn’t really care either – much more interested in her book.

But just a word here. You’ve seen three or four photos of Troyes. I took about 60 and I could easily have taked three or four hundred. For a lover of medieval architecture and half-timbered buildings, the city of Troyes is a paradise and should not be missed for any reason at all.

site de montaigu souligny troyes franceNot too far out of Troyes at the village of Souligny is a sign for the site de Montaigu. Montaigu is French for “steep hill” and they weren’t joking either because it was. It’s another oppidum and castle and although the earthworks are well-preserved, there’s nothing left of any building.

Even more annoying, there isn’t anything in the way of interpretive sign to tell you what it was that was here and you are left to resort to guesswork.

bulgarian lorry jump start le cheminot franceThere’s something else to add to our list of accomplishments on this journey.

Here at Le Cheminot, a Macedonian living in Italy had a flat battery on his Bulgarian lorry that was towing a Belgian trailer through France (so hooray for globalisation) and so Caliburn and I had to give him a jump start. Good old Caliburn.

But while all of this was going on, we talked about life in Macedonia. He told me that things were much better under Tito – there was work and everyone had some money and some kind of future but now, rampant capitalism has taken over, there’s an immensely rich minority in the country and everyone else is poor and there’s a pile of unemployment. Life in Macedonia is bad. He’s not the first to say this kind of thing to me, and I’ve seen much of this with my own eyes. Communism had its good points as I have said before, just as I have said that Capitalism can in many cases be evil.

And I’m having an early night tonight. The flaming gas has run out halfway through cooking tea.

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Sunday 11th May 2014 – I FEEL A HUNDRED …

caliburn motorway service area chalons en champagne france… times better when I’ve had a decent shower and so you can imagine that this morning I’m feeling on top of the world (so just watch someone come along and spoil it) after the shower that I have just had at the truckstop on the edge of Chalons sur Marne. In fact I can safely say that the shower was better than the sleep that I had – but only just, because that was really good as well.

I made a coffee and then piddled off into town, finding an Intermarche open on the way so that I could do some shopping there and have something to eat at lunchtime, and from there I went into Chalons.

via agrippa porte de la marne chalons en champagne franceChalons is a very interesting city, and a very old one too. It came into existence in early Roman days, being situated where the Roman Via Agrippa, that ran from Milan to Boulogne, crossed the Marne. There’s nothing left from those days but you can trace the outlines of all three of the defensive walls that ringed the city at one time or another.

This is the site of the Porte de Marne where the Via Agrippa leaves the city and arrives at the river.

crumbling masonry Church of Notre Dame en Vaux chalons en champagne franceThere’s plenty that remains from the apogee of the town’s fortunes in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries but if you peer through the window-dressing you’ll notice that it’s all in a very poor state of repair indeed and whatever it is that they are spending the town’s money on, it isn’t on the historic monuments and artefacts, that’s for sure.

One important church here in the town fell down in 1157, and it looks as if a couple of others are on their way to join it.

aeroport paris varzy franceWhen I used to regularly use the N77 I remember them building the new airport at Varzy. One of the things today was to go for a wander around and look at it.

Its official title is the Aeroport Paris-Varzy, even though it is miles and miles away from Paris and ss you might expect, knowing my luck, it’s closed on a Sunday (which I find rather strange) so I couldn’t go inside. However I didn’t miss much as there wasn’t much to miss. It’s a little, well, basic despite the modern buildings.

There were a couple of bus stops here, one of which advertised a service to Euro-Disney, but all of them bore the same depressing notice – “as of 28 October 2012 the shuttle service is suspended” and gave a list of local taxi numbers, implying that not even taxis wait at the airport. A brand new railway link has been built to the airport but that goes to the freight terminals and doesn’t continue on to the passenger terminal.

All of this implies that a passenger service does not figure highly on the airport’s list of priorities. So if you are offered a flight to Paris-Varzy, bring a good book with you – preferably War and Peace. There isn’t even a hotel for you to go and have a kip.

aubeterre aube franceThere were plenty of other things to see along the route – none of which you might find particularly interesting – but a word does have to be said about the little village of Aubeterre. Its claim to fame is that during World War II a Lancaster bomber flying overhead exploded and the bits fell to earth. The rear gunner was trapped in his turret and that fell as one piece, all of about 16,000 feet.

Then, incredibly, the turret found some high-tension cables in a field. It bounced onto the cables, which interrupted its fall and then fell to earth. The rear gunner walked away from the wreckage.

troyes franceA mere cockstride away from Aubeterre is the historic city of Troyes. This was somewhere that was high on my list of places to visit.

I just meant to have a brief hour or so around the city, but the more that I saw of the place, the more that I explored. I could easily spend a couple of days here.

So I’ve parked up for the night just outside the city and I’ll be back in the morning.

maison paul de chomedey de maisonneuve marguerite bourgeoys troyes franceBefore I clear off though, I’ll have to post this photo because this building is something for which I came especially to Troyes

A couple of people who figure quite often in these pages, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, are Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Marguerite Bourgeoys. The former was the person probably most responsible for the founding of Montréal and the latter was someone who, having been a friend of the sister of the former, was inspired by him to go to the New World.

Following her arrival in 1653 she devoted her life to Good Works especially amongst the female population of the city and the filles du roi, the young girls from the orphanages who were sent to Nouvelle France to become wives for the soldiers who, on the expiry of their period of engagement, opted to remain behind.

For her devotion, she was canonised in 1982, the first female saint of Canada.

Before leaving for Nouvelle France she stayed for a while with Chomedey de Maisonneuve and his sister in their family home. And this building is it.

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Saturday 23rd July 2011 – I’M NOT HERE

Or, at least, I won’t be by the time that many of you read this – although most of you have been saying that I haven’t been all here for quite a long time.

No – I’m on my way to Brussels for what may well be, if it comes off, the defining moment in all of my efforts.

If you have been following my exploits you will know that I own what was formerly a pretty derelict apartment there, one that I bought as an investment and in which I lived in a form of camping-out style for a while.

Over the winter, as you know, my friends Liz and Terry helped me work finish the work (or they might well say that what actually happened was that I got in the way of them finishing off the work) and it was put up for sale. A buyer was quickly found, and the sale is planned to be completed on Monday.

That means that all of my hard work and effort over all of these past 32 years has finally borne fruit. While most of my friends were out living the high life, I was investing my cash in property with just this moment in mind, and I know in whose shoes I would rather be today.

But that is or course always assuming that it does in fact sell – never be sure of the bird on your plate until you have your fork stuck in it.

Mind you, assuming that it does, I can cancel piles of Standing Orders at the bank and that will free up another pile of cash each month and then I need to book my air ticket to Canada because Strawberry Moose and I are going to have a holiday.

You might remember that I bought some land over there, and we are going to buy a mobile home to put on it and we are going to install ourselves there for a month. And why not? We deserve it.

Having recorded our outstanding radio programme yesterday (that was really all that I did) everything else has been done.

We had another excellent drive and I was here in Brussels after just 8 hours and 30 minutes on the road – and that includes stopping to eat a pizza and to fuel up. That’s pretty impressive too, coming the “old way” via Auxerre, Troyes and CHalons-en-Champagne which, no matter what they call it these days, will always be knwwn by me as Chalons-sur-Marne.

rainbow varzy franceAnd I wasn’t alone either during the route – and I’m not referring to Strawberry Moose. Somewhere on the road between Nevers and Varzy this absolutely beautiful rainbow suddenly appeared.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you pull over to the side of the road and take a photograph – that is, if you weren’t in a hurry. And even if you are in a hurry you can take a photograph anyway, especially when there’s no-one else about.

It’s not very often that you can see them so clearly and distinctly, and it’s even rarer that they come out well in a photograph.

And they weren’t the only stops that I made either.

Along the route between Chalons-sur-Marne and Charleville-Mezieres my path takes me over an escarpment that was the scene of very bitter fighting during World-War I and the area is littered with old remains and the vestiges of abandoned trenches and the like.

ossuare de navarin marne battlefield france And we go past the Ossuary of Navarin. This is a memorial to the French soldiers who died in the various Battles of the Marne which took place around here and is where they keep the bones of soldiers discovered in more recent times.

Designed by Maxime Real del Sarte, it’s also a memorial to Quentin Roosevelt, son of the President Theodore Roosevelt (he of the “teddy bear” fame) who was killed in the vicinity. Last night was the first time that I had ever seen it illuminated and so it had to be worth a photograph.

As an aside, it’s also where the body of General Henri Joseph Eugène Gouraud lies. He led the soldiers here during the later period of the Battle of the Marne, having already lost an arm in the Dardanelles. When his weill was read, it was found that he had eschewed the traditional tomb in the Invalides Cemetery given to all heroes of the French Army, and expressed a wish to be buried in the Ossuary “alongside all of my soldiers who were more like friends to me”.

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Friday 17th June 2011 – THAT WAS A LONG …

… day!

I was reading a posting about a teacher friend of mine who had done an 8-hour day on a Saturday and how she was annoyed. My working day starting yesterday was 32 hours and 32 minutes, which is more than a teacher works in a week.

It was about 20:45 when I reached Liz and Terry’s this evening, and my day was far from over.

Caliburn, Strawberry Moose, the Brian James Trailer and the Takeuchi mini-digger crawled off the train at Calais as dawn was breaking, and without hanging about, we hit the road straight away.

copulatum expensium, as we Pompeiians say. I’m going the shortest, most direct route home and if I’m going to be fleeced on the péage, that’s rather a shame. Towing a trailer, I have to pay the same as an artic.

“Keep away from Paris” was the obvious plan. I’m right on the limit of what I can tow with this outfit and I don’t want any police interaction or any confrontation with crazy urban motorists.

There’s a motorway from Calais via St Quentin and Reims as far as the far side of Troyes, and then over the Burgundy mountains to the motorway at Nevers, with only the centre of Auxerre to worry about.

And that’s the way that I took – a nice leisurely saunter where I sometimes even reached the trailer-towing 90kph speed limit.

The motorway exit at Troyes is … errr … complicated, with a series of roundabouts where the camber is all wrong for the unbalanced rig that I’m driving. We had a couple of interesting moments.

And I almost came a cropper at the Intermarché on the edge of town – I’d forgotten about the height barrier and the jib of the digger. But I could enter the car park via the petrol station. I had a very late lunch and fuelled up Caliburn – he’s been quite thirsty, and no surprise!

The mountains were certainly exciting, as anyone who has driven between Auxerre and Nevers will tell you, and I was relieved to hit the motorway again. With no policemen bothering me, I could drift on slowly through the early evening down to Sauret-Beserve.

And was I glad to be back? I’d worked hard over the 20 or so days that I’d been away and covered a lot of ground.

Now I’m ready for a rest.

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Tuesday 1st March 2011 – AND NOW I’M NOT!

I’m back on the road again heading to Brussels. I’ve had a hectic few days just recently and it isn’t going to stop either any time soon.

This morning I woke up in the cold to a typical Combraille-type hanging cloud (isn’t it good to be home?) and after a somewhat late start I emptied Caliburn of everything that I had taken down to the farm. It’s all stacked in the barn now and I’ll tidy it up in due course. Following a doze for an hour or so, I went to this CREFAD meeting at St Gervais where I was one of the guest speakers.

I met a new English couple there and their daughter. They haven’t long been in the Auverne, having moved from near Haltwhistle. What attracted them to the area was that it looked “just like home” and I can echo that. “I wanted a stone house” said the wife. “I’m a true border reiver and stone doesn’t burn”.

That of course brought back memories of my former connections with the border and Archie Fisher’s album Windward Away – “every time I think of you I see a border reiver”. That of course leads on to the story of the 9 year-old boy who knew how to make a marriage work – “you tell your wife that she is beautiful, even if she looks like a truck”. And of course from there we have “every time I think of you I see a Leyland Reiver”.

Once the meeting was over, I shot off straight back to Brussels. I didn’t make it all the way back (which is only to be expected seeing as how late it was when I left). I made it as far as St Florentin which is between Auxerre and Troyes, where I crashed out in the big lay-by there at the side of the road.

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Saturday 25th September 2010 – Well, I’m back home.

And hasn’t this been an exciting few days?

The journey back was just as exciting though – it was raining when I left Brussels, (which was actually at about 21:00 in the evening Friday) and it gradually came down heavier and heavier.

At Troyes it was starting to become difficult to see with the rain and my eyelids were becoming heavier and heavier, so I parked up at St Florentin at 01:30 for a few hours for a sleep.

A torrential downpour woke me up at about 08:00 and that set the seal on the whole day. It rained non-stop after that and I brought the whole lot back home with me.

But the exciting events of the last couple of days have worn me out and I crashed out this afternoon. In fact I was hard-pushed to make it to the footy tonight.

And don’t ask me what happened there because I really can’t remember. I came back here and was out like a light.

I’ll be dead for a week, I reckon.    

Monday 19th April 2010 – I BET THAT YOU ARE …

.. all wondering what happened to Monday’s blog entry when you looked last night.

The answer to that is that at the time that I would normally be on the internet, I was asleep in the back of Caliburn in a layby somewhere between Troyes and Chalons-sur-Marne.

Some kind of emergency has declared itself in Brussels. There are a couple of things that needed to be done here and so I was obliged to hit the road and head north.

Something that rather disrupted my day as you might expect. I had all kinds of plans for things that I was going to do.

But it was a good job that on Friday I had emptied out Caliburn and given him a good clean-up. It was a simple matter then to check the oil and water and sling a pile of stuff into the back.

And with a flask of coffee, a pile of butties and the usual stuff to nibble, I hit the road and that was that.

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