We took a nice walk up to the orchard and back past the pub, looking for Chips the cat – no sign of him at the moment, but I’m sure he’s still around. They must have recently done a cleanup of the pond – hardly any floating plastic and no shopping carts or bicycles to be seen.

I had a short nap in the afternoon, followed by a delicious lamb chops and roasted veggies dinner.

Up fairly early the next morning we packed and walked down to the train station. We managed to get a direct train to Bristol rather than having to change in Cheltenham as I’ve done in the past. As usual the airport shuttle bus was only a few minutes wait right in front of the train station.

Once again we got to the airport in plenty of time for the flight back to France – this time getting through security in Bristol was a bit of a hassle, however. Even though I was going back with the same things I’d come over with the english security system flagged several things. They considered that my toothpaste, deodorant and face cream were now all liquids and I hadn’t packed them right. They also flagged the bag of carrots I had in my coat pocket (looked like sticks of dynamite maybe?) – it’s Ryanair, after all, and they don’t feed you on the plane so I’d come prepared.

This time I got a window seat and had a better view – seeing the coast of England down below, then an offshore wind-farm was pretty neat. The drive back to Mansle was nice – we stopped at one point so I could take photos of some Poitou donkeys – they are so cute!

Some of them had quite large heads and very long ears, with shaggy/woolly coats. First one, then another, then all of them came over to the fence and we fed them my leftover carrots. This type of donkey almost died out after WWI but have actually made a bit of a comeback.

We got back too late in the day go retrieve Mo, so settled back at the house for a nice BBQ burgers dinner with Neil Sr.

When we did pick up Mo in the morning she at first didn’t seem that excited to see us – she even stopped to ‘water the lawn’ before jogging up to Colin. She is pretty happy to be home, but apparently enjoyed herself well enough while we were gone.

We took her for a walk down to the campground bar and had a nice cafe creme, and Laurent brought us a small plate of tapas – some lovely sheep’s cheese and some little ham and gelatin cubes which were very tasty.

On our way back to the house we stopped at the Penalty bar for a drink, then crossed the street and got some fresh produce from the market seller that Colin knows. It’s so nice to be in a place where almost everyone will say bon jour, shake your hand and/or kissy-kissy cheeks, whether they last saw you yesterday, or eight months ago.

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