C'EST LA VIE - THAT'S LIFE

Castelmoron-d'Albret 7th May

Today is our village’s market day. It doesn’t do car-boot stalls; being on a week day and in a tourist area it mostly has crafts, clothes, Jewellery and food for the English. We avoided the ‘feves’ and bought some spicy olives for lunch. French word of the day is Bijoux, it means jewellery, which our French landlady makes and sells in the shop next door to us and at the market. In the twenty minutes we sat and had our taste of France she sold 2 items, not bad trade. Taste of France, a damn nice hot chocolate, espresso and a chocolate tart.

We had a home morning and I discovered the art of warming the top story of our apartment. In NZ in the hot weather you open the house up to cool it down, in the North of France you open it up to dry out the dampness, but in the South you open the house up to let the warm air in. I now just have to perfect the bottom floor, see below the difference in light between our upstairs bedroom and downstairs living area.

We ventured out in the afternoon to geocache on the Bastide village trail. Five finds (100%) in 30degree heat, three lavior/washhouses, one church and one lone grave in a forest. The highlight was Castelmoron d’Albret’s cache where the water source flows out from under an inhabited medieval stone house and runs into a lily pond. The temperature has now risen to 34 degrees so we headed home for a refreshing beer and panache (shandy).

Roger’s mother loved France and visited the country many times, probably faring better than us because she spoke fluent French. Today would have been her 99th birthday, so in honour of a beautiful lady who loved blue flowers (so I was told by her sister) below are some photos for her.