My Week in Review to the 6th May

goat mosaic in Melle 

I'm linking this post up with The Sunday Post at The Caffeinated Reviewer.

We're in our French mobil-home now, lounging on the bank of the Boutonne river (it's more a stream at this point!) and it is Ridiculously Hot! Fortunately we worked out how to put up a large purple parasol that the previous mobil-home owners left so we have some shade! I understand it's pretty good weather in the UK right now too, but I am very glad we're here! It's much greener than back in March and we're enjoying wildlife spotting. Today several vivid blue Beautiful Demoiselle dragonflies are flitting about as well as some slender red dragonflies that I haven't had a chance to google yet. I've seen Orange Tip butterflies, the coypu has been about and the ducks were bickering earlier though they have quietened down now - probably because of the heat! We've even got a robins nest in our outdoor cupboard, complete with several babies! Pretty sure that means we can't use the washing machine out there until they're all fledged though I have been laundering by hand all winter so that's not a huge problem.

my new-to-me reading space 

In Huge News, it was my birthday on Thursday and I am now 43 - nearly a grown up! Thank you to everybody who sent gift, cards and kind wishes. I felt properly spoilt all day! We celebrated with a gorgeous lunch at Secret Garden in Melle. If you're visiting nearby this summer, make sure to eat their Tofu And Quinoa Salad. Absolutely delicious! You'll probably need to book a table - we just got lucky and snuck in. We had a wander around the pretty old town too and bought lovely rich patisserie in lieu of a birthday cake. I spotted a Little Library in Melle but didn't have a book on me to exchange at the time, however there is one in Chef Boutonne too (by the playground outside the Mairie) where yesterday I swapped Lettre à Zohra D for À la folie ... pasdu tout by Valerie-Anne Baglietto. Not my unusual sort of read I admit, but it has lots of up-to-date French conversation so I hope it will be educational at least!

green! 

We visited the weekly Saturday Chef Boutonne market which was a much easier cycle than our previous day's excursion had been. I am not going to blog about cycling here until I am better at it. Flat Spanish seafronts are useless as preparation for undulating French countryside! The market isn't enormous (thank goodness says Dave!) but had a good range of produce stalls including local honey, local goats' cheeses and plenty of fruit and veg. There's a mix of professional traders and folks looking like they are selling straight from their gardens. I'd like to start using the market instead of just supermarkets and yesterday's visit was a good start.

This week on Stephanie Jane you can look forward to the second Reading Women installment on Thursday and next week's roundup will be delayed until the Monday because the 13th is Top Ten Etsy Finds day. I think I might focus on dragonflies for my Etsy finds.
And congrats to Erato whose novel The Cut Of The Clothes won May's Spotlight Post giveaway! You'll be seeing that promo post on Literary Flits soon. If you'd like the chance to win a Spotlight Post for your book (or just a book you love!) make sure to add its link to This Linkup to be entered into the June draw ...

Our first five days in France have been pretty busy so I apologise for being way behind on comments and blog visiting. I've not forgotten you all :-)

wisteria at the chateau 

Around the blogosphere:

Olivia's Catastrophe reviews an emotional YA read, Girl In The Broken Mirror.

The Butterfly Reader recommended books from music choices.

Here's what you might have missed Across My Blogs this week. Click the images to visit the pages ... and don't forget to enter all the Giveaways!

	Artisan Rainbow	Literary Flits	Stephanie Jane
M O N D A Y
T U E S D A Y
W E D N E S D A Y
T H U R S D A Y
F R I D A Y
S A T U R D A Y
S U N D A Y

We set a new Longest Cycle Ride Ever record!

It's been the most glorious day here in the Haute-Garonne

A canal lock is called an ecluse in French 

and we made the most of it by spending several hours cycling along the beautiful Canal Du Midi. By the time we got back to Camping Violettes we had completed our Longest Cycle Ride Ever! We cycled 45 kilometres which is about 28 miles and just snuck above our previous 26.6 miles from Cullera last Spring! In tree terms, that's going from plane tree number 35721 to plane tree number 33428 And back again. I love how all the plane trees along this part of the canal are numbered. I have no idea why though. (Informative answers in the Comments?)

Interesting sights along the way included frolicking water

Water voles in the Canal du Midi 

voles and a heron, none of which I managed to photograph though Dave got some good shots of the voles. He spotted the first one and also saw two herons.

We appreciated a rest stop at Gardouch which has picnic tables, toilets and a drinking water tap. We sat to eat lunch at one of the tables and I was flattered by another cyclist admiring my 'jolie velo'! The cycle route has benches regularly spaced all along it and people were sitting in the sunshine at the locks and on the grassy banks too. I do think it lacks food and drink facilities though. We saw one Salon du The barge, but it hasn't opened for the season yet. Otherwise there seems only to be a bistro at Mongiscard on the other side of the water. Perhaps there are more temporary cafes open in the summer months? We thought, as it is a sunny Easter weekend, everything would be open and we could get tea and cake en route! Perhaps we should have booked ourselves on the 'gourmand' boat pictured below. It looked like they were having a birthday party.

Birthday boat on the Canal du Midi 

My favourite sight, just back from the canal, was a line of

A car in a field! 

buildings that appeared to be some sort of commune. We first noticed the white car unended in a neighbouring field next to a blue windmill tower. Then we saw that the garden fence was actually a line of reclaimed bicycles and wheelchairs. Waste not, want not. Elsewhere, the back end of a blue minibus gave the impression that it had been driven into the wall. Dave commented that the only thing missing from the arty-boho vibe was a vegetable patch. That was on our outward journey. A couple of hours later as we cycled back, two men were digging away! Maybe they heard us?!

Recycled fencing 

Our ride was about four hours including stops for lunch,

I'd like to try a bicycle carriage ride 

gawping at wildlife, and just because we wanted to enjoy the ambience. It was great to be two of so many cyclists and walkers. We saw all combinations of people from solo men haring past like they were in time trials, to families with small children all pedalling away, and even two guys who looked to be well into their eighties pottering along on battered bikes that couldn't have been much younger! One bike rental place looked to be doing good business and we also saw a Camping a la Ferme site which had bicycle carriage thingies to hire. One was in use on the path and they look great fun - tandem cycling but with less of a falling off hazard!

We overdo our 13 mile moor walk and recover with Festival Of The Spoken Nerd

So, that Festival Of The Spoken Nerd download I mentioned a post or so

Steve Mould gazes dreamily into a nerdy campfire
#distractinglysexy
(Photo by Kitty Walker) 

ago actually took six hours in the end. Our poor Osprey needed a good rest after all that effort and I was so relieved when the opening credits fired up successfully on Dave's laptop. The show was well worth the wait. @FOTSN got into the campsite spirit by tweeting me this photo of a 'nerdy campfire' from the show which will actually become a tricoloured fire tornado! More about that later and it's probably not a good idea to try it at home - not in your own home anyway.

Having ignored our own advice from the day before not to attempt a

thirteen mile walk on a stupidly hot day, yesterday we attempted a thirteen mile walk on a stupidly hot day. If you're following from home, Dave has, nerdily, plotted the route on this gmap so you can see more-or-less exactly where we walked. Footpaths did unexpectedly multiply and then randomly peter out, and several of their signs had bleached to invisible-arrow-white, so we strayed 'slightly' from the original plan, but Dave had chosen such a beautiful area of riverbank and then moorland that it really didn't matter. We set out from our pitch at 11am, returned at 6pm and covered about 13 1/3 miles with 45 minutes over two stops for a picnic lunch and a mid-afternoon apple.

The River Breamish burbled alongside us for the first half hour or so and,

These Christmas trees are too big for Bailey 

as other bloggers are posting Christmas In July at the moment, I'll join in with this Christmas Tree plantation we passed. A brief road walk, uphill of course, then a couple of minutes on a private road which allowed us to ogle a cottage with an incredible garden - veg plots, flower beds, greenhouse and sun room. It wasn't for sale! We continued ascending up a green wooded track on to the Harehope Estate whose sign welcomed us as long as we stayed on footpaths and didn't light fires. Fair enough! The sheep here were particularly ebullient and a couple even followed us inquisitively. Everywhere else they have just scarpered so this behaviour was a little unnerving. The woods faded to grass with bracken and then to bracken with heather. The moorland area resembles a large shallow bowl and we planned to walk a large circle around it before returning the way we had come.

Blawearie was our first landmark. The abandoned farm is now almost

Looking towards Blawearie 

totally derelict and only inhabited by sheep. Looping round towards it, we were plagued by flies, but the views were fabulous. Our exciting wildlife spot of the day was an adder. I didn't see it a first, blithely stomping straight past, but my footsteps must have woken it because Dave then noticed its movement just in time before he trod on it. We watched it for a few seconds before it disappeared into heather. Other sightings included swallows and skylarks, butterflies and bees, and a pale brown bird of prey which looked interesting but resolutely refused to fly close enough to give us any chance at identification.

Isolated on the moorland was this memorial to a Douglas Brown who

Douglas Brown memorial 

died in 2003. I haven't been able to learn anything about him, and we wondered if he had worked on this land or particularly enjoyed walking here. Another unusual sighting was five Other Walkers in the distance. We are so used to having Northumberland to ourselves that we were surprised and a little disgruntled to see them! Misanthropic? Us? By the time we could see Blawearie again we were getting weary ourselves. The ascents weren't distressingly strenuous on this walk and we carried lots of water including an iced thermos, but this probably was too much walk for us in this heat. We are both still suffering today so didn't mind being kept indoors by a torrential downpour this morning.

Fortunately we had a lazy post-walk evening lined up watching my aforementioned download of the Festival Of The Spoken Nerd show Full Frontal Nerdity. I haven't seen FOTSN since I went to Pi Curious at The Blind Tiger in 2012. Despite its suggestive title, Full Frontal Nerdity has less nudity than Pi Curious (i.e. none at all) but the trio are still very Very funny. I am more towards the 'ooh fire' end of the nerd spectrum so was chuffed to actually get some of the Real Science jokes and Matt's manually conditionally formatting a huge spreadsheet reminded me of creating endless audit templates at one of my old jobs. Excel wasn't made for that either! I still love Helen Arney's punning lyrics - she was the first of the Nerds I ever saw - and I giggled almost continuously throughout the show last night, only ceasing to gawp in wonderment at things I never knew. How far away is a safe distance from a hat-swiping smoke ring? Should I replace our awning light with a gherkin? Are we really all made out of spreadsheets? You'll need to watch Full Frontal Nerdity to find out!

Full Frontal Nerdity is available on DVD or as a download directly from

the Festival Of The Spoken Nerd shop. It's the perfect gift for your inner nerd, or the special nerd in your life and, as a reward for having read right to the end of this post, I will let you know that during July 2015 you can get two whole pounds off the DVD price by using the discount code KICKSTARTER during checkout. How can you possibly resist?!

We are Norman church spotting in Norfolk - Cawston and Marsham

As of Thursday, we are settled in a beautiful Caravan Club CL in Cawston,

St Agnes church tower in Cawston 

Norfolk. The site used to be sidings and a station house for a railway line, now dismantled and reimagined as The Marriott's Way - a 26 mile long footpath / cyclepath / bridleway that goes from Norwich to Aylesham. The Way is just behind the hedge behind our caravan with the gate leading onto it some 20 metres from the campsite gate - even more convenient than The Cuckoo Trail was from The Homestead campsite! Looking out the opposite way, we can see the tower of the 14th century St Agnes church. At 120ft, apparently it is the second tallest in Norfolk.

If you want to pinpoint us from home, we are on Ordnance Survey

Creatively woven signpost 

Explorer map 238 which I know because of a wonderful information pack put together by the CL owners, Claire and Tim! Together with lots of local guide booklets, we also have the loan of some walking and cycling route leaflets for the duration of our stay. Yesterday we undertook a six mile walk around the next-door village of Marsham, one of the 'Out And About Broadland' series. A well thought out walk, we were guided through heathland ablaze with yellow gorse flowers, past cute village cottages and a sprinkling of posh houses, through the churchyard of the 13th century All Saints, over windswept agricultural land where we attempted to identify the seedling crops, and into pretty dense woodland which felt extremely old. The bridleway sign pictured had been creatively reinstated in the woodland after its pillar fell down. The thatched boathouse below was in the grounds of the Cawston Psychiatric hospital. Someone had also partly hidden a scraggy toy dog in the hedge here which made us jump! En route Dave spotted a Muntjac deer and I spotted a Roe deer. Less excitingly, I saw a squirrel and Dave a rabbit! Rabbits appear on the campsite in early evening too and one is the prettiest golden-brown colour. We also have a speckled thrush - I haven't seen another for years.

Thatched boathouse 

Our other two afternoons have seen us cycling. Thursday we explored The Marriott's Way for a few miles in the Norwich direction, and Friday we went the other way, to Aylesham. It is not tarmac at this end so the surface is a mix of earth, rock and thin sand. All perfectly rideable although a bit juddery in places! I was very proud of us for managing to get all our shopping on Friday without using the car. Firstly we took a walk into Cawston which is only a couple of hundred metres. There is an excellent deli-patisserie-cafe, All Things Nice, with lots of local produce. Then, the other side of Cawston, is a Londis incorporating a Post Office. After lunch, our cycle to Aylesham enabled us to reconnoitre the Bure Valley Railway station and find the cycle-locking points (they're on the platform), before nipping into Tesco to pick up the few things we hadn't found in Cawston. I saw a Morgan in the car park. I have a photo, but the picture seems too big for the 2G wifi on our Osprey.

This afternoon we're off to visit Dave's Dad in Sheringham. I'm fairly certain we'll go by car and we plan to see some of Norwich on Tuesday. We've got several leaflets for the city in our pack too.

Bailey at The Siding with The Marriott's Way behind the hedge 

Sizzling in the Sagunt sunshine

We liked Camping Malvarrosa when we first arrived practically a week ago and are still

Oh look! Girlfriend on a beach with a book! 

impressed with it now which is pretty rare for us! Being so close to warm, swimmable sea is obviously one of the main attractions, but it is also generally peaceful, there is plenty of flat countryside for Dave to explore by bike, I have beaches and lovely promenades to jog and walk along, and we even have History and Culture close by. The site has a section for touring caravans and motorhomes, a separate bit for tents, and the rest is a village of various permanent places but each is an individual encampment rather than simply bland, identikit statics. We have had more luck with wildlife spotting. There are several herons that fish the nearby irrigation canals and we have also seen kingfishers and Dave came across a field, maybe of harvested rice, with dozens of egrets in it. A cheeky red squirrel accompanied us for part of the climb to Sagunt castle. It was much smaller than the grey ones we used to see in Polegate and refused to sit still long enough for us to get a decent photograph.

We visited Sagunt city which is a few miles away. We had thought we could walk there, but got as far as the pretty Canet de Berenguer in an hour and a half and decided perhaps all the way to Sagunt was a bit optimistic in this heat. It's up to 29 degrees in the afternoons! In common with several towns along this bit of coast, Canet is spread over two sites. There is a pretty coastal strip of summer homes which is practically deserted at this time of year, and the town proper is set back a little inland. Therefore our walk along the beach to Canet only got us to their part of the beach and not an ice cream kiosk in sight! There were lots of large tyre tracks in the sand where the frequent boardwalks out to the sea are being taken up, presumably for safe storage through the winter. We discovered a shady park for a rest and then wandered home.

Sagunt is famous for its historical past having existed since at least the fifth century BCE, been at war with Carthage, and been invaded by Hannibal after an eight month siege. We visited the extensive castle site on a hill above today's town. There are remnants of several eras throughout the site, but sadly not placarded so we weren't always sure what we were looking at. Roman columns and inscriptions abound, but the ancient buildings were plundered for later rebuilds including a Moorish stronghold and the Christian reclamation that followed. There is also a section at the far end which obviously very recent renovation, perhaps to stop subsidence down the hill. A small museum housed some of the best preserved pillars and inscriptions, otherwise outside was a huge jigsaw of broken stone, sorted to a degree, but not yet with its places identified. An interesting aside for the museum was that all the information was bilingual. One language was Spanish, obviously, but the other was not English or French or even German as most of our fellow campers are, but Valenciano. I knew Catalan had its own dialect but we didn't realise that Valencia does too.

There is a railway station nearby with several local trains a day into Valencia. It is supposed to be getting a bit cooler here next week so we plan to take advantage of this to spend a day or two exploring the city. Any suggestions of must-sees?

In the meantime, my eagerly anticipated Kirsty McGee album has arrived. Do you remember I blogged about its Kickstarter campaign? It's called Those Old Demons and we're really enjoying the music. Interesting lyrics and unusual orchestration make it quite different from our usual fare. I think the official release is at the end of October and pre-orders can be placed here:

We saw an otter!

A welcome sight at the end of a long walk 

We nearly didn't go for a walk today because, apart from a half hour of sunshine this morning, the sky has been overcast most of the day. The weather here has changed over the past week from practically guaranteed sunshine to anything between full sun and brief heavy rain showers. The two photos that accompany this post were taken only a day or so apart. It's still much, much warmer here than for the poor souls we left back in the UK though, so mustn't grumble!

Back to today. We set off for a little stroll about half past three and achieved an hour-and-a-half walk which took in tricky narrow goat trails high above the river Mira, rocky river banks, the edges of ploughed fields, and dusty tracks. I love how the scenery here can change with seemingly every corner. As we passed the abandoned watermill near our campsite, Dave stopped suddenly as he had spotted a ripple in the water. His immediate thought was turtle, but the animal soon turned out to be an otter. We were both delighted - neither of us is a particularly quiet walker so I think we often scare off potential wildlife sightings. I have never seen a wild otter before, only rescued captive ones in enclosures. We watched for probably five minutes as the otter dived and swam around, seemingly oblivious to us on the bank. Then, later in the walk, a second ripple resolved into a turtle who had slid back into the river at our approach but then took its time about swimming away under grasses.

I guess we're not going walking today 

Other walking 'triumphs' this week include discovering a new place to ford the river by improvising rock stepping stones. It was a bit scary at the time and I think we both felt euphoric afterwards! Yesterday's four-hour picnic walk enabled us to eat our bread and cheese lunch on the bank of a gorgeous babbling brook. This was all the more surprising as most of the route had been fenced-in dusty tracks, but just as we got to about half-past one, turning a corner revealed the perfect picturesque spot. I've improvised a way to attach our Picnic Rug to my candy-striped Picnic Set Rucksack - like the one linked, but PINK! (It's still that one you got from The Pier, Adrienne, do you remember?) So we can have perfect picnics with our gingham-edged plates and tartan rug.

And we went out for Sunday lunch this week too. Together with Herman and Albertje, and Fritzhof who at the time was the only other guest here, we visited the Cafe Central da Alcaria in the nearby village of Aldeia. There is a little bar area inside and terrace space at the side of the road, but once you walk through the bar, it is like stepping inside someone's home. Which is pretty much what we were doing! A back room is whitewashed and has large tables to seat maybe three groups of up to about six people each. The menu comprises of 'meat' or 'fish' and you need to both place your order the day before and specify what time you will arrive. Our table chose 'meat' and one pm. Fatima, the owner, had created a tasty kale soup for starters, followed by delicious slow cooked pork with chips, rice and salad. Dessert was a selection of fruits, fresh from the garden, and also a slice of Buterkoek (recipe to follow once I've made it myself) which Albertje had baked and taken as a gift but which Fatima insisted on serving some of too. We then sat out in the sun for coffee and I spent the rest of day dozing in my sun lounger with an audio book. Bliss!