Is there a rain god out there, as my loyal reader must know this summer it nearly always rains when I head for the airport at the end of the weekend. Just to test the theory I changed my travel pattern last weekend, because I had a project milestone closing on Friday afternoon that went down to the wire. So I flew to La Rochelle on Saturday morning from Southampton with Flybe, I was joined on the train from Waterloo by several old (pensioner) soldiers heading down to Poole for a parade. It was only 8:30 in the morning but they had beer, whiskey and a few other beverages on the table and some sandwiches for a bit of ballast. The rest of the carriage appeared to be full of delegates heading for the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, very bad timing to get out a copy of the Spectator which I had bought just to see what it was like these days, not really my style as it turned out, but I digress. We departed our stand on time only to return 5 minutes later because the fuel manifest was wrong, so finally we were away 15 minutes late but a tail wind meant we landed only a couple minutes late. Just to fool the rain god, if he exists, I arranged to work from home on Monday and fly back to Stansted on the Monday evening flight. True to form on my journey to the airport it rained, so the rain god must be looking for my little white car travelling from Sigogne to La Rochelle before letting fly with the Monday deluge.
With this new flight arrangement no work got done on Saturday, by the time I arrived home it was 4:00pm, so we sat outside in the sun with a drink and did our usual catch up. Of course I had to look at the building progress, which was quiet impressive for a week. There are three builders working to complete room 2 in three weeks, and so a bathroom had appeared and the ceiling and two of the four walls had been installed.
On Sunday morning I started to lay the bricks, well to call them bricks is an under statement they are bigger than breeze blocks, to complete part of the wall next to ‘my’ new internal doors in the garage, to make that end of the house weather proof for the winter. After three hours work I had managed to lay 9 blocks, but they are, almost, level and straight, I spent the next 2 hours filling and pointing, and then cutting the next 9 blocks to be laid this coming weekend.
Then it was off to an open day at a local riding stable which had opened at the beginning of the year. We thought Fleur might like another ride on a pony, however when she saw some of her friends from school she was more interested in playing with them than riding ponies. The stables themselves are very impressive, especially as this was begun from a standing start, they already have a lot of horses and ponies, so after Franca has been back later to talk to them and find out what they offer for tourists, we may add them to our web site and arrange some riding packages for guests in 2008, watch this space, I can feel some horse power weekends coming on.
Back at La Rochelle airport on Monday afternoon, I found that my usual modus operandi had been scuppered. Normally I write my blog sitting in the departure lounge waiting for the flight to arrive, but they have either changed the usual security system by closing the security channel and customs post we used to use, or the hand luggage scanning machine was broken forcing them to change the security channel, but what ever it was, we were not allowed in the departure lounge until just before the flight and all our cabin baggage was scanned through the hold baggage scanning machine. Interestingly there were none of the usual French passport control officers there either. Could this be a sign of things to come, I'll write about this later.
Well I think that is enough for this article..... so until the next time ( if I can get a flight out to La Rochelle this weekend, it not looking promising at the moment, but that's another story)
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