Le Tour and a marathon

It is Monday morning so it must be La Rochelle airport, but it is not raining, I did drive through the drizzly rain most of the way, but it cleared up as I drove into La Rochelle, and now there is some lovely warm sun beating down on my sun burnt neck.

This was the weekend that the Tour de France passed through Sigogne, so needless to say we had to be there at the roadside to cheer on the cyclists. The village put on a good show with the usual beer tents and barbecue in full swing for the whole day and the atmosphere was friendly. I must admit Le Tour is not the greatest spectator sport in the world, you see each cyclist whiz by your chosen vantage point in the blink of an eye, then you have to wait one and a half minutes to see the next one whiz by, and this went on all day as the 141 cyclists left in Le Tour all took their turn over the 55km time trial from Cognac to Angouleme. It was a showery day so some cyclists that caught a shower whilst on the course were at an obvious disadvantage, especially through Sigogne as there were two large drain covers right on the apex of a sharp corner which they had to slow down for. But all in all it was a good day. There were a surprising number of Dutch and German and even Australian people around and one Dutch family from Nieuwerkerk on holiday near Barbezieux Alfonse, Caroline and their three children came back to our house for an aperitif and toilet stop. As everyone arrived back, the sun came out, and so did the drinks, so they stayed a little longer, and we had a lovely end to the day, swapping stories and chatting, since everyone was enjoying themselves we got some bouillabaisse soup on the go because no one had really eaten all day, so that kept everyone going.

So you are all dying to know how it went with ‘ma petite voiture’, well it could not have gone better, more by luck than judgement I seem to have picked a very good little car, it is also a very fast car so it kept up with everything on the road, and passed quite a lot as well. I left South East London at 12:00 having visited Sainsburys to stock up on food, and finally arrived in Sigogne at 10:00pm local time (9:00am UK time), in all I was on the road for 10 hours, and I could not have done it much faster in my Jaguar.

Where does my sun burnt neck fit into all this, well Sunday was a work day, though most people in our household slept until around 11:00. One of the things I brought over in the car was 20 pieces of glass to replace all the old glass in the window in room 1. Little did I know what I had let us in for, we think that the old putty (if it was putty) had been there for so long it had almost turn into a rock, it was certainly rock hard and took hours to get off the 20 little frames in the two windows. The sun was not really shining indeed it was raining from time to time, with just the odd glimpse of the sun, but some how we got sun burnt, or wind burnt maybe. Having started work at 12:00 we did not finish until 8:30 in the evening, and it was not my best bit of glazing working either.

So who was the ‘we’ in the glazing marathon, Gerard who is a Dutch friend of a friend recently mailed us and asked if we needed any help on the house in exchange for some food and lodgings, this was too good an opportunity for us to let go, so Gerard arrived shortly before me on Friday evening for two weeks, so after a leisure day on Saturday to recover from the drive from Holland, ands to watch Le Tour we got stuck into the windows on Sunday, and it was just well Gerard was helping otherwise only one window would have been finished by 8:30, as we just managed one window each and we were not slacking.

Whilst I am sitting at the airport Gerard is getting ready to start the mammoth task of painting the outside of the house, which was to be my task for the three weeks of my August ‘holiday’. I shall still be doing some painting, after all Gerard is on holiday so I can't expect him to work everyday. Hopefully the roof will be finished so I will be tidying up the back of the house which to be honest looks awful at the moment, so we will be doing our bit to make the village look a little bit nicer.

It is now only 2 weeks to go until my August ‘holiday’, and next weekend we will get our first official Bed and Breakfast guests who are driving down from Belgium on Friday, so I am flying back to France on Thursday to help prepare as much as we can. Luckily we have our able assistant Gerard with us so everything should go smoothly. You will find out in the next missal from the airport.

A little foot note for Stellios at Easyjet, last weeks flight took off late but the chaps on the flight deck made up most of the time on the way back to Gatwick, only to loose it all again because we could not get off the plane for 10 mins because of tunnel congestion, (you can’t mix inbound and out bound passengers), in the end we had to be bus’d to the immigration hall. So nice try Easyjet, we almost had an on time journey. To be fair it looks like most of the problems stem from the fact that Gatwick airport appears to be struggling to cope with the throughput of flights it is currently handling.

This will be my last Easyjet flight for a while, I am on Ryanair next week because I booked the flights months ago when I did not know about the Easyjet service. After that I will be using the services of a cross channel provider as I will be driving down for my three week sojourn in Sigogne, but I have not booked anything yet so its going to be expensive. I don’t know if I will be flying Easyjet again this summer, because I don’t know when their trial summer service finishes.

Well I just saw the plane circling round so its on time or even early so that’s enough waffling from me for now, time to get in the Speedy Booking queue to get my front seat on the plane...