Journey to the Centre of France Chris and I have been doing a lot of cycling recently. Getting Covid back in March, losing Tobi and gaining Polly disrupted things for a couple of months, but we’re now back in the saddle as often as we can manage it. We’re regularly doing trips on our ebikes of around 60 kms, and we’ve managed several 80-somethings too. Not bad going for two oldies! One trip took us to the centre of France. Well, maybe or maybe not. There are no fewer than seven places claiming to be the geographical centre of the country! However, as far as we’re concerned it’s in the village ..read more

Goodbye to Tobi, hello to Polly We lost our lovely dog Tobi a few weeks ago due to complications after surgery. Suddenly Team Dagg was a crucial member down. It was an awful and heart-breaking shock. There’d be no more geocaching and campervan adventures together, no more wingdog chasing after Chris’s model planes, no more walks around our fields and woods here, no more ecstatic welcomes at the door after our absence, however short. Just no more Tobi. We were devastated. We hadn’t been without a dog in 36 years. Chris and I became dog owners not long after we got married, and since then have ..read more

Our first 2023 outing in Precious the campervan took us to Haute-Loire, once we’d dropped Rors off for his afternoon train back to university. It didn’t get off to the greatest start. We’d planned to park overnight in the area set aside for campervans at the Aire des Vulcans services. However, this parking area was closed off! Evidently the manager of the services considers that campervans migrate south for the winter with the swallows and thus don’t need to park overnight near Clermont Ferrand in the winter months. Very frustrating, as it was a very picturesque spot. Fortunately, Chris had a ..read more

Rewilding Les Fragnes You’ve probably come across the term ‘rewilding’ as it’s a bit of a buzz word these days. And rightly so, especially in the face of climate change. This disastrous year of droughts, fires and floods seems to be hammering the message home into the even the hardest sceptic’s hard head that global warming is real and calamitous. We all need to do what we can, every single one of us, to protect planet A since there is no planet B. Rewilding is a method of ecological restoration that is becoming increasingly crucial. Disrupting and polluting humans step back and leave an area ..read more

Tenways to help the planet Chris and I are now the proud owners of a pair of electric bikes. To use the correct terminology they’re actually electrically-assisted bikes, but that’s a bit of a mouthful! The difference between electric bikes and electrically-assisted ones is that the motor in the latter type of bike cuts out at 25kph, or when you stop pedalling. In an electric bike, the motor would keep going. We have gone for bikes from the Dutch firm Tenways. The model we’ve chosen is the CGO800s. Chris’s is a sleek black and mine’s a handsome pebble grey. There’s also a blue version, but thos ..read more

February saw us setting off on a fossil-hunting trip in Precious to Occitanie. After dropping Rors off at Guéret station for his Sunday night train back to Limoges, where he’s a student, we drove to Montpeyroux to park up for the night. We’ve visited there before: it’s one of France’s prettiest villages. (There are actually quite a lot of them, more than 160 with new additions to the ranks most years.) However, it was dark when we arrived, and anyway, we weren’t there to sightsee, just to eat and sleep. And drop a pan on Tobi, oops. Only a little one and not from a great height so no harm was ..read more

Our most recent mini-break in Precious, the camper van, had the theme of cliffs: cliffs at the seaside, cliffs that used to be at the seaside, riverside cliffs and cliffs along the edge of geological fault lines. Our first stop was at Mérigny to visit the spot where the river Anglin resurges after disappearing underground some 2 kms away. The spot is known as Cul Froid = Cold Bottom! I forgot to fetch my camera so I only have mobile phone photo to share. I’m not sure if you can see it, but there’s a small, metal water-wheel in the foreground. Very close by was our first cliff, the imposing Ro ..read more

Since we were having to take Caiti to Châteauroux to catch the train to Paris in the first leg of her journey back to Ireland, we decided to head west from there into the Brenne parc naturel regional (regional national park) for a spot of geocaching. Brenne lies in the south-western corner of the département of Indre. It’s a low-lying, damp area dotted with around three thousand man-made lakes, the earliest ones being monk-made in the twelfth century. As well as being a regional natural park since 1989, it’s also a region naturel. The difference between the two, as far as I can tell, is that ..read more

Now that seeing dinosaur footprints was crossed off both our bucket lists, we moved on to another item on Chris’s: visiting a lava cave. The only place you’ll find lava caves in metropolitan France is at Monistrol d’Allier in Haute Loire. (They’re ten a penny in some regions of France d’Outre Mer (= overseas France), especially in Réunion). Lava caves form when, due to cooling because of contact with the air, the surface of a lava flow solidifies but the underneath doesn’t and continues to flow. A diminishing supply of lava means that eventually there’s nothing left to flow out from under the ..read more

Our most recent trip in Precious, the campervan, took us to Lozère in the Massif Central. And trust me, it’s certainly a massive Massif! We set off Sunday mid-afternoon, our first stop being at Guéret Station to drop Rors off for his train to Limoges, where he’s a student. Up until now, his weekly train has always been bang on time so we reckoned that we’d be able to drop him off for 4.27pm and get to our planned overnight spot in Briffons by 6pm, and thus in daylight, albeit fading. But you know what they say about plans. And sure enough, this week, somewhere between Montluçon (where the trai ..read more