Orléans

9-21 July

14 July

Time out to be with family, so just a few observations.

There’s a delightful Sushi (et al) restaurant, where what you can order as much as you like for a fixed price. If, however, you find you can’t eat it all, you cannot take it home and you pay by the piece for what is left. Seems to work for them and the restaurant is always busy.

Trams seem to travel very fast, even when sharing the road, though this doesn’t seem to pose a problem. Easy to use, not too many stops. Which meant we had to walk quite a long way in the hot sun to get where we wanted to on one occasion. A lot of curves, semi-circles and U-turns on the tracks but the long, bendy-trams seem to cope well.

Chris and Mathilde have two new kittens, almost 3 months old. They are extremely cute, though haven’t worked out that they should try and match the human sleeping pattern, instead of sleeping lots during the day and hooning at bedtime, very very early morning and early morning.

What Chris calls 'administration pinball’ (you know the one - no, we don’t handle that here you’ll have to go to the third floor and find Mr G…..who says, oh no, I don’t know anything about that, you’ll have to go to….and so on) also happens in the larger shops. Décathlon is a large sporting goods store that we have been known to frequent quite a lot. We walked there in the hot sun from the somewhat distant tram-stop to play the same game. First,  (Step 1) we were directed to the bike section...Sorry, I don’t deal with that, you’ll have to go to the workshop (atelier) and ask them. Step 2: No, I can’t help you at all. My colleague is mistaken. You need to go to Santé et Découvertes - it's the second to last aisle. Well, there wasn’t one of those, but (Step 3) we did find similar items in the 4th to last aisle, in Electronique, and waited while a sales person helped a customer make his purchase (a long time). This man knew what we were talking about but (step 4) didn’t know how to solve my problem except to take it to his colleague - the person who had initially sent us to the bike section. Step 5. I suggested I would go on the internet and see if I could find a solution. Thank goodness for the internet! Solution found!

The rain flowing down the Loire raised the level last week and the current was strong. It was our privilege to watch as seven teenage ducks bobbed quickly down the river in the current until the adult duck upstream (mother?) screamed at them to get the hell out of there and go to the side. Some obeyed straight away, others needed the intervention of the flying adult poking at them to get into line and paddle furiously to the side, not against the current. Once in the still water the adult duck seemed to use her beak like a mother cat would, pulling the others to safer water and into the reeds by the shore. Score 7/7 - well done, Mum!

14th July, Fête Nationale. Fireworks. From 23.00. The Blois fireworks, 100km away, took place on the 13th. Orléans on the 14th, moved somewhat west because of the height of the river. Quite close to the fireworks in the next municipality, Saint-Jean-de-la-Ruelle, 4km away, which we could see from our bridge viewpoint. In fact, five of the municipalities had their own fireworks display - fairly inconceivable to NZers - logical to the French - the municipalities are from 2 and a half to 4 and a half km away from Orléans, as the crow flies. Everyone is advised to make their way on foot, as the nearby roads will be closed. The population of Orléans is something over 110,000, that of the larger municipalities up to just over 20,000. Imagine that in Wellington! The fireworks were all good, especially the purple ones with white blobs shooting out from the purple!

Some of the crowd watching the fireworks in Orleans

Picard is on the corner of the street where we are staying - maybe 3 minutes walk. Yay! For those of you who know and love Picard, skip this paragraph. Picard sells frozen food - not just ordinary stuff, but fantastic stuff - puff pastry cases with scallops (or spinach and goat's cheese if you prefer), wonderful desserts, including ice-cream flavours to dream of; pizzas, savoury tarts and quiches, crêpes and galettes; vegetables of all varieties, sometimes made into patties that are easy to heat. Lots of things that require a preheated oven. No good at all to us as bikers but a lot of fun when there is a stove available. Modestly priced to the extent that a pre-cooked meal may well be quite a lot cheaper than buying all the bits separately and preparing from scratch. Certainly great for a change, anyway.

Picard and the corner of the street

Chris works in the building at the centre of this photo. The tram turns sharply around to the right, then the left of the building.

As we were returning from a walk we struck a large number of vintage cars driving through town. Bonus!

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