Our new life in our Motorhome, Monday 26th September 2016

Allan went for bread this morning. The first boulangerie was closed for their annual holidays but are back tomorrow. Luckily there is another boulangerie in the main square. Well, main square is a wonderful name for it but actually it is just a few parking spaces in the middle of the village.

We seem to be visiting some of the smallest villages in France at the moment and why not? Why should we just go to the large cities of France. This is where people live, in small communities and you can find some extraordinary things in the smallest of villages!

These people want us to visit them and use their shops and restaurants. They make us feel welcome by providing places for us to stay, usually with services. In England, sadly, this is not the case where we are confronted with over-priced camping sites (even the Caravan Club CL's or the Camping and Caravan Club CS's are expensive in our home area), height barriers to prevent us parking in car parks and the English towns want to charge us for a day's parking, beside a busy road that I thought my Road Fund License had already paid for. (Today's rant over!)
Seriously though, nearly everyone we chat to would like to visit England but know how difficult it is compared to the continent. Our tourist trade is missing out badly.

We strolled down through the park (obviously doing a geocache) and took a look around the lake. What a lovely place this is.

All through the day the utility block with the toilets and laundry area and what could be a wash up area for the barn sized very large community space, is being repainted. The litter-bins and doorways are being done today and it all looks very nice.

The wooden cladding and the barn are being re-varnished today.

These villagers are so lucky. There is fishing, play equipment, sports, community space, toilets, free parking and recycling facilities.

We followed the river and then, crossing the pretty flowerbeds and flower covered bridge over the river

we walked up into the village and went from north to south and east to west. It doesn't really take too long in a small village in France. It is quite surprising to see some of the trees and shrubs that are growing in the gardens.
A vine covered in Kiwi Fruit, huge banana plants and fig trees laden with ripe fruit - even a horse!

These trees don't seem to be all that unusual here as they are in many gardens. The climate here is so different to wet and windy Sussex.

We walked through the square and got chatting to an English guy who had bought the house to the left of the Church in Monday's photo. He said he loved it here and there is so much going on.

We saw a museum of archaeology and prehistory next to the Church and would have liked to visit it but unfortunately it is only open on some Sunday afternoons and we are sure to be off on our travels again by then.

Our walk then took us past quaint old cottages

and past the green space leading up to the Salle de Fetes.

On our return to the aire Dorothy spied that a French lady was doing some artwork behind a board and just had to be nosey. The lady was doing a cross-stitch pattern and it was a very big one of a Japanese garden. Dorothy explained that her next project is a cross-stitch but quite small compared to hers. Dorothy then went to get it to show her. The husband of the lady showed their pattern and it is just the same sort of pattern to follow as Dorothy's, just much, much larger. Allan is so proud of Dorothy that he insisted that we show off Dorothy's rug. The French couple were really knocked out by the size and craft of Dorothy's rug and Allan is even prouder of Dorothy.

It was quite like a cottage industry here as apart from this, another lady was doing some sewing and another was either making jam, preserves or pickles. We felt quite industrious today!

It seems that many Motorhome ladies do a lot of craft work. The men just chat and drink beer, each to their own!

We felt that it was now time to move on and so we said our farewells to the people we had met on this aire. We were very surprised when the couple next to us (with the lady doing her cross stitch) told us that he was 85 and she was 82. They were very sprightly for their age. We hope we shall be able to continue this life when we are their age.

Well, here we were, on our way again. We travelled further south to Lathus, which is a little village between Poitiers and Limoges.

On the way we passed a beautiful chateau on the edge of a pretty little village called Bourg Archambault, and just had to stop and take a look.

We arrived in Lathus to find the aire was of several hedge marked pitches. We were lucky enough to take the last one which had its own small patch of grass to the side of the motorhome as well as at the back.

On the Aire, having an early morning coffee just before breakfast and later in the day Allan is hard at work on the Blog. It is such a hard life!

Today we had a look around the village. Outside the church we met an English couple who had been renovating a property here in Lathus for the last two years.

Having walked up past the Church and found the Marie, we came back and walked up the other main street as far as the furthest Boulangerie, coming back through the park which led to the rear of the Aire and a closed down camping site.

Across the road is a large fishing lake so today we had a wander around part of it.

There were four fishermen who were happily catching little fish no more then 4 inches long and throwing them into their keep nets.

Allan, who likes to wind people up, took delight in showing them a photo from facebook of a gigantic catfish that had been caught in France by Dan Barden whom Dorothy used to work with!

There are a lot of Motorhomers who just seem to be using this Aire as a one night stop on their way to of from Spain.

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