On the road again

Saturday 14th June

Time to leave our very comfortable apartment in St Etienne. Sometimes it's hard to find something suitable, and affordable, but this one was a winner  - a balcony and air conditioning.

We are moving northwards to be back in Paris in 3 weeks. Today we travelled 300k to Montlucon. No reason for picking the town, except it was about the right distance. Today we turned off the motorways option on Dora - let's use the 'country' roads. This meant it took longer, but there is more to see. 

The first part of the trip took us through hilly, forested country. Lots of spruce trees. After seeing the video about wood and the bark beetle yesterday we have a bit more understanding of the way these trees are harvested - they cut them down when the bark beetle has basically killed the tree. The wood is still good to use and is then collected and milled. 

Once we left the St Etienne area we were again in cropping country. Mostly wheat, ready to harvest, no canola. We had spotted a Chateau on the TV coverage of the cycling so decided to go via this - Parentignat. We thought about doing a Chateau tour, but it was close to lunchtime and the Chateau closed for 2 hours for lunch so we decided to move on.

The old - 

Vs - the new.
This was alongside the road where we'd stopped to take the photo of the old castle.

The Chateau at Parentignat.
When we turned around there was a long avenue of trees leading up to these gates,
which bordered the original driveway approach to the Chateau.

One of France's beautiful villages along the way - but we'd picked the wrong day.
The medieval festival of Usson was on for the weekend
and given that we had no idea of what it entailed,
we decided to give it a miss and move on. Got this photo instead.

We started looking for lunch (and a toilet). We passed through lots of tiny villages, every few k, none of them showing any signs of food - where do people who live in these tiny villages go for their daily baguette? Or shopping? We were starting to get a bit desperate when Dora got us on to a more major road, and a big town. McDonalds - satisfied both needs. 

Tonight we are in a hotel so we ate dinner out - Royal Wok - a buffet Chinese restaurant. Lots of prawns - yum, and oysters. We like these restaurants - plenty of choice. You can just eat the prepared food on the buffet, or pick your ingredients,  and sauce, and the chef cooks it up for you. Sweet and sour prawns - another yum.

Sunday 15th June

A slow start to the day, and no plan except to buy more breakfast cereal at the supermarket before it closed at lunchtime. We asked at reception for suggestions on what to see and do for the day, to be told that there is nothing here in this town. We picked up a brochure suggesting a few churches nearby with medieval frescoes. This was plan A.

On our drive to the supermarket and for petrol we passed a sign pointing to the medieval village centre of Montlucon. This was a fabulous village. We walked the whole village. There was a lovely garden as part of the Chateau. Lots of photos.

11th century.

Loved this door.

Another 11th century house -
with the original gate leading down to the basement.

A lovely display of cat ornaments. 

One of the original gates to the village.

The original timber lintel - on the 11th century house below.

The Chateau - closed for renovations.

Love these windows.

This church is actually 15th century
but was built on the site of the original church from 11th century.

The gardens of the Chateau.

Street art - guess who?

Lots of church bells ringing signalled the finish of a christening.

We had lunch at a boulangerie before returning to the hotel to watch the end of LeMans 24hr, and then the end of the Criterium de Dauphine. 

Dinner tonight was pizza at a pizza restaurant in the city - seemed to be the only place open but the pizza was great. Sunday is actually a good day to travel around the city - traffic is very light and no one gets annoyed with us just cruising slowly and looking at stuff. I like this town/city - what we have seen of the centre part of the town is typical french houses and buildings, lots of narrow one way streets, plenty of parking.

So, a nothing to see day, turned out very enjoyable.