We’ve gone for some nice rides over the last days – if we don’t leave early enough it gets pretty hot, though. We stopped one time for a quick visit with Tony and Joyce.

Mo’s been a very good girl while we’ve gone out riding each day – she now seems to understand that we won’t be gone long, and we will come back for her.

The sunflowers have almost exploded with growth recently – a couple of weeks ago they were just starting out and now they’re taller than the poppies. Some farmers are already cutting the first crop of hay.

One day after our ride we went out for lunch – first we tried the little cafe on the lake of the willows, but it was completely closed down. So we kept driving to Aigre and stopped at the restaurant in the square. We both got the beef skewers, which were one of the two daily specials.

The meal came with a salad, as well as green beans, small salty roasted potatoes and a mild pepper dipping sauce. Every part of it was just delicious – the meat was tender and flavourful, the green beans had a bit of garlic but not too much – it was really a very lovely lunch.

Another day we started taking the deck railings down so we could sand and paint them – Colin took the nuts off and removed the wooden slats from the metal railings while I pounded the bolts out of the slats. It’s going to be quite a job – sanding the slats, painting them and the railings, then putting it all back together again.

We drove to Saint-Sulpice-de-Cognac to get a few things for the campervan, including a couple of little portable chairs – they fold up into almost nothing and have handy little carrying straps. Now when we park somewhere and want to photograph races from up or down the road we don’t have to lug the lawn chairs along.

A couple of mornings started out very misty-looking – I wondered if it might be smoke by it didn’t smell like it, and I’m not aware of any large fires burning nearby. On one of our rides we went to Ligne, where there’s a cemetery with some Templars’ graves – all that’s left are the stones, with any inscriptions long since worn off.

We did a bit of tidying up – the book shelves in my bedroom look much better, although there are probably a lot of books that could go to the charity shop some day. One night we had donair kebabs for dinner, and another night we went down to the campground bar – they were showing the women’s soccer game between France and the US, and they had a live band playing.

The band wasn’t bad, but the result of the soccer game sucked.

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