The latest from the home front

Well - what an epic adventure....... We left Plymouth on the 22:00 sailing for Roscoff on the 19th April.  Arrived early Tuesday morning and then hot-footed our way across France (See the maps link above for the route).  It was sooooo easy.  All motorway and fantastically well sign posted.  We reached the house about 4pm Tuesday evening.  We pitched a 4 man tent in the house (thanks to the kindness of Jo & Drew who trusted us with one of theirs.)  Blew up the air beds, rolled out the sleeping bags, light the 1 ring stove, cooked a chilli with rice and cracked open the wine! Aaahh tres bon!!  It felt good.  As we had been travelling down France, the outside temperature reading on the dash had been climbing 0.5º degrees every 10 minutes.  Naves was in a balmy 22º C and stayed around that temperature every day, but climbing steadily.  We had a little rain over night on Thursday night.  When it first started, the pat;pat;pat on the waterproof membrane woke me up, because it was a new noise.  As I realised what was happening and the rain began to fall steadily, it lulled me back to sleep, feeling snug in 'my new home'.  By lunch time the next day, we were back to the sunny weather and that was the way it stayed, temperature steadily climbing.  We left on Sunday afternoon, and slept over night at LAVAL in a B & B (which is a chain of low cost good quality over night stop facilities.)  By Friday 30th April, the temperature had risen to 27º!!!  We were very lucky that the weather was so beautiful at such an early time of the year.  The locals had tomatoes and lettuce in the ground already and by the looks of it had been in for a couple of weeks.

Everyone was so friendly towards us.  When they found out our lack of basic amenities (we had to go the the next village, 4.5 km away for a WC), they insisted that we use their bathrooms for showers etc., and held a BBQ to introduce us to other locals, when they found out it had been both Simon and my birthdays' whilst we were there.