The brutally hot weather has finally broken, at least for now. After reaching around 40 more than once there’s since been a couple of fierce storms – lightning, rain and lots of wind.

Since it’s not quite so hot anymore we went for a lovely ride one morning – it’s so much more pleasant riding when it’s sunny and warm rather than sunny and blistering hot.

We had a nice visit with Tony and Joyce one afternoon on our way home from shopping in Ruffec – they’re so nice and don’t mind when we just pop in unannounced.

We’ve applied online to get ‘photography passes’ for the Tour of Burgos and was it ever a frustrating experience. We got a response very quickly after sending an email, and were asked to fill out a form and send a couple of photos and some ID. OK – no problem, except nothing worked right. First of all I saved the form as a PDF, but when it was saved all of the info I’d filled in disappeared. Then the photos – mine were jpg, but Colin’s phone put his into a different format that the lady (Teresa) couldn’t use. So we re-filled the form on Colin’s laptop and I took a photo of it with my i:pad – all was resent to Teresa and we’re now waiting for approval. All together it was about 3 hours of frustration and I was ready to scream – I had a glass of wine instead.

Another day we had to go down to Angouleme to get a carriage for Mo – Colin had ordered one online but it hasn’t shown up yet and we’re about to leave for Spain. The carriage is made to seat 2 kids in it and be pulled by a bicycle – the young folks that helped us in the Decathlon store thought it was great that it was for Mo.

Assembling the carriage was another exercise in frustration – it came with no clear instructions so Colin looked at some youtube videos which were somewhat helpful. Again it took far longer than expected but finally we had success – we celebrated by putting Mo in her Mo-bile and taking her down to the pub for a drink. No more listening to 80’s music and being bribed with a sausage for her while we go out for bike rides!

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