Return to France - and rain!

Saturday 11^th June

We had no plan for the day but needed to fill in time until check-in at our gite at 4pm. We found a brochure with a few sites to see near Dinant, still Belgium. First place we went to was the abbey of Maredsous. Dora did her usual thing with shortest mapped route and found a goat track – the car in front of us either knew where he was going or didn’t use shortest, because as we pulled out of our goat track, he was in front of us. This abbey dated back to the 1300s. When we arrived there were lots of cars in the car park – surely not this popular with tourists? We found that there was a ceremony going on, presentation of awards to Red Cross blood and plasma donors. We gatecrashed for a short while to hear the band play. Rob also enjoyed listening to the organ music in the church.

Good luck with that - dogs need to pee on every blade of grass.

From there we headed to the Citadelle at Dinant. Boy, was this impressive as you came down into the river valley of Dinant, and there it was on the opposite side of the river. Dora did well again to take us to the free parking at the top rather than the metered, and hard to get, parking in the street at the bottom. We did a guided tour of the Citadelle and the tour guide did it in English for us, as well as Dutch. We found out the difference between a citadel and a castle is that a citadel is for soldiers only, where a castle is for royalty and their community. The citadel was originally built in 1040, occupied by King Loius XIV in 1675, the Dutch in 1800s and the Germans during both wars.

The dome cap on this church used to be on the guardhouse on the bridge.

The photos don't look so impressive, but it really grabs your attention when you come around the last corner with the magnificent church sitting below the citadel.

We got to hold one of the muskets from the 1800s - they are extremely heavy. 

A chateau we could see from up on the citadelle.

The Meuse river - looking south. France is about 30k up river. Apparently there used to be a bridge every 30km and having control of a bridge was an important strategy in all 'wars'. The bridge at Dinant used to have a guardhouse on the bridge and you had to pay a toll to cross it, or to go under it in a boat. 

Dinant's other claim to fame was it was the birthplace of Monsieur Sax - the inventor of the saxophone. They have these painted saxophones spread across the bridge.

As part of the museum they have replicated a trench and a bunker from 1930s. The bunker had a 30degree tilt on it so you were very unbalanced – apparently if they were built on sandy soil and bombed, the structure stayed intact but shifted in the sand.

We had lunch in the town of Dinant, looking out over the river Meuse at the small tour boats.

From there it was time to move on to the village of Oches where we are staying this week. As we headed further south the weather got more overcast and we had showers of rain. Heading in to France and we could see just how much rain they had had over the past couple of weeks. All the rivers and creeks were full and fast flowing. As we got on to more minor (and very minor) roads you could see where they had been very wet. They were very narrow for passing and you didn’t want to get too far off the bitumen as the sides were very boggy.

This is a really small village with no shops, but of course has a church. Not even a bakery, but the van comes every 2^nd day and tours the village tooting for customers. The gite is lovely and very comfortable. The owner speaks no English but we managed with my little French and the help of google translate. On arrival here we just checked in and headed out to shop for dinner – we had to go 30 minutes to the town of Vouziers where there is a supermarket. There are two villages closer that have bakeries and a small shop so they will be used for the one or two items we need. First thing we need to buy next time we shop is a tea towel.