Benefits of Being Retired #217

Cycling Today:  35.8km (On the Loire a Velo route from Gennes to Saumur (and back again))

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For 31 years the dates of our visits to France were constrained by the UK school holidays. We became experts at extracting every possible hour away from the holidays (finish work at 4pm, leave for the ferry at 6pm, get home at 1.00 am to start work at 9 the same morning - that sort of thing). And of course having to cross the channel made travel times much longer.

Now it's a bit different, the garden and visitors from the UK (most of whom are constrained by the UK school holidays) mean that in July and August we are pretty much tied to La Basse Cour. It does mean we can take advantage of good weather out of this period like we've had this week and nip off with the caravan to the Loire Valley. Crammed with visitors in July and August it's nearly empty at the end of May, perfect for visiting Angers, Saumur and cycling the impressive Loire a Vélo cycle route. Like last year in Arcachon we've found the campsites less than 10% full and pitched up at a basic site in Gennes where we can see the mighty Loire river from our caravan and have all of one end of the site to ourselves:

And the weather was perfect for an early start to ride 16km to Saumur on the Rive Droite, look round the old town and castle perched above the Loire, have a beer in the sun and a sandwich and ride back to Gennes along the Rive Gauche. Appropriately enough Barbara is riding the bike she got as a retirement present.

Not Every Day ...

Walking today 3.8km

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I got a bit of a surprise on Sunday afternoon when I went outside after a tea break - there were a group of six people standing on our drive. I recognised Nicole in the group but then did a complete double-take when I saw a car in our hedge with its back wheels in the potager. 

What had happened was that a disabled lady who was on her way to visit our new neighbours opposite had stopped her car on their (uphill) drive. Then it appears she had selected R (Reverse) instead of P (Park), shot backwards down the drive across the road, over the verge, through our hedge and into the potager. I found her name was Marie-Pierre and she was stranded in the car, her 85 year old mother had managed to get out. 

Dominique had been called and arrived with his tractor and, remarkably, managed to pull the car out if the hedge and across the road. Even more remarkably the car was undamaged and started first time.

Interesting the people you meet on your drive ....... 

Elderflower Cordial

Cycling today:  27.6km

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About this time of the year three bushes on our talus burst into pure white flat heads of flowers. The flowers of the Elderberry are distinctive forerunners of the deep black fruits to follow in the autumn. Last year Barbara made a litre of Elderflower cordial which, after we finished it in August, we decided wasn't nearly enough.

So today we've been making the first two litre batch of the year.

First collect the flowers, they need to be fully open and fresh counting 20 heads to a litre:

Then make a syrup with three kilos of sugar:

And the juice of four lemons:

Bring the syrup to the boil, add the lemon juice and elder flowers and allow the flowers to steep in the syrup for 24 hours:

Tomorrow the liquor needs to be sieved, filtered and bottled.

Hypermiling

Walking Today:  3.8km

Swimming today: 1.15km

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Moles caught today:   1 (Tim)

Moles caught Year to Date:  

Tim    1

Pip.    5

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There's a group of drivers, mainly in the USA it must be said, who delight in extracting the last hundredth of a mile per gallon of economy out of their car. Search for "Hypermiling" and you'll find a rich world of websites, chat rooms, forums and blogs dedicated to detailed discussions on whether it's better to use cruise control or drive manually when going up a hill at 42mph and other such key questions of the day.

Not my scene really but I do have a weakness for economy driving despite the drawback of driving a car that weighs 1.75 tonnes. So I took a some delight in, for the first time, getting over 530 miles from a single tank of fuel (I could probably have got past 550 miles if I was feeling braver):

Jessica, my first old grey mini, weighed in at under half the weight of the CRV but with her 850cc engine derived from a design first produced in 1953 didn't do more than about 28 miles per gallon. Due to a faulty fuel gauge sensor seal her tank only held five gallons before petrol leaked out (safety standards were a bit more lax then .....) so her range was less than 150 miles. Various Fiestas got to the low 40's mpg but no previous vehicle I've owned has got over 50 mpg.

Gérard gets confused when he uses one of my retractable tape measures as it's marked in inches and centimetres, of course in the UK we still mix metric and imperial, so we buy fuel in litres but measure consumption in mpg.

So, to carry on that hopeless cross-contamination of units, fuel in France is €1.20 a litre, that's 81p a litre on current exchange rates so £3.68 per gallon and that's 7.3p a mile. Not bad I think ......

Ready to Fly

Walking Wednesday:    3.8km

Walking Thursday:        3.9km

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Despite the cool weather (there was a frost on the grass at the bottom of our field this morning - latest frost in the year that we've had in five years) our Blue Tit (Mésonge in French) family are keen to be out of their box.

They've not flown yet but it won't be long .....

Nesting time

Cycling Today:   9.6km

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We spent a lot of time over the winter feeding the birds, essential for them as I've blogged before when they need to eat 25% of their body weight daily in cold weather. The implied deal is that we'll feed them over the winter and then they'll help us for the rest of the year by eating greenfly and caterpillars from the garden. We've put up several nest boxes to encourage them to stay around but up to this year they've not been used. This year there are two families successfully nesting, one of them in the nest box mounted outside the window on the upstairs corridor. The parents are working hard constantly flying backwards and forwards feeding the young:

I'll keep a watch out for when the youngsters fly and shut the cats in and try and get some more pictures.

Round the Clock

Walking today:  3.9km

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Although I sometimes forget something I heard last week (had to text Adam on Sunday mid-conversation with the hockey team as I'd forgotten the name of the Bournemouth manager ....) I do know the registration numbers of every car I've ever owned. And their names when I used to give them names - I wonder if modern cars still get named now.

So:

Jessica the grey mini was GJT986E

Katy the blue mini was KAA388L

Sally the black Fiesta was SLL371R

A blue Orion C383PPK

and so on.

In the days when cars had mechanical milometers with five numbers they went round the clock and reset to 00000, nowadays it's an electronic display with 6 numbers (so presumably going round the clock now means doing a million miles). Sally was the only car I'd ever got past 100,000 miles - unless one of the others had been clocked which was entirely possible - and she struggled on to 125,000 miles before suffering multiple critical failures on the A5.

About the only similarity between Jessica and our current steed, a black Honda CR-V, is the wheel at each corner. Jessica passed away having gallantly struggled round Southampton for five months with a failed big end and terminal rust. I sold her to Tommy's scrap yard on Northam Bridge for £12 (would have been £15 but I'd sold the battery to a fellow student for £5). She had 74,000 miles on the clock.

Today, eight years to the day after we took delivery, the CR-V passed 100,000 miles. 

It's had a hard life since moving to France, towing in over 60 tonnes of sand and gravel for the build, driving down muddy country roads, pulling the caravan and sitting outside for three years before we got some cover for it. It's suffered half a day off the road for repairs in that time replacing a brake calliper that had failed due to grit, probably picked up at the quarry.

On a good run (ie: downhill) Jessica with her 850cc engine could manage 30 miles to the gallon, the Homda weighs at least three times as much, has an engine nearly three times bigger and, over the last 5000 miles, has averaged 43 miles to the gallon.

Car technology has come a very long way in the time I've been driving, unless we have some massive problem I expect we'll keep the Honda for another eight years. I don't think I'll ever give it a name though ...

Grange wall completed

Walking Friday:  3.8km

Swimming Friday: 0km (pool closed as it was a public holiday - Rearrange these words into a sentence that makes sense: "In France Public No Service Culture")

Walking Monday: 3.8km

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When I used to be involved in project management one of the basic errors people used to make was confusing task time with elapsed time, so a job takes 5 days but takes 7 as there's a weekend in the way.

So it was with repointing the gable wall of the Grange, our stone outbuilding that we are slowly converting into a garage. We estimated it (correctly) as 5 days work but lost 5 days to the weather, 1 to hockey, 1 to completing tax forms, 1 to urgent gardening tasks and 1 somewhere else we can't remember (just like projects I used to run  .....).

It was finally finished today and looks pretty good:

Election Day

Walking Wednesday:     3.8km

Walking Thurdasy:         3.9km

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An update to my previous post on expatriate registrations to vote. The number registered for the 2015 election is apparently now 114,000, a great improvement on the 2010 number of 23,000!

I'm preparing for a long night watching possibly the most interesting election in my lifetime.

It's all been a bit too much for Robert Peston I think, his Twitter feed has gone from strange to even stranger since the BBC went into election purdah yesterday evening. This one made me smile though:

Get out and vote if you haven't yet, one way or another this election will make a difference.

Molecatcher - The champion starts the new season in great form!

Walking Monday:     3.9km

Walking Tuesday:     3.8km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.00km

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Having an acre of land, mostly grass and adjacent to other fields, means that we are sometimes visited by moles. Normally I'm fairly tolerant of moles as long as they stay around the outside of our land, it's a different story if they wander into the more formal grass area that I have delusions of turning into an English parkland lawn.

There's a wide selection of noxious, poisonous and explosive products on sale here to deal with moles. In addition the locals have various methods of dealing with them; Jean swears by glass in the tunnels (moles are haemophiliac and die if they are cut) whilst Jean-Claude has constructed a series of wind vanes in his garden made out of plastic bottles that vibrate in the breeze and persuade the moles they shouldn't be nearby.

I prefer traps.

I bought a set of French traps four years ago, we caught a couple but soon the moles got wise and frankly a bit cocky and started pushing the traps out of the runs in their molehills. So, 2014 brought a new set of shiny British traps plus an entertaining DVD on how to set them. These were more successful than the French ones, we quickly removed three moles and cleared the lower part of the field for the whole season.

Pip can't watch videos, cats eyes don't register the images correctly. But he watched me attentively when I was setting the new traps and two days later turned up with a mole of his own in his mouth. Pip catches moles by listening for them under the ground and digging them out like a dog:

In 2014 the score was -

Expensive British Mole Traps      3

Pip.                                            7

And the champion mole-catcher of 2014 has made a storming start to 2015 with two more catches. The moles are still taking the mickey out of me though, another mole burrowed into the side of one of my traps today without triggering it .... 

A brief life in a wet world

Walking Wednesday: 3.8km

Walking Thursday:     3.9km

Walking Friday:          3.8km

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There's a summer postcard on sale here in the shops which is a cartoon of a holidaymaker huddling behind a standing stone as horizontal rain sweeps across. The caption reads "En Bretagne j'etais arroser" - something like "I've been hosed down in Brittany".

Our climate here is generally a little warmer than in Hampshire, we are usually a couple of degrees above the temperature in southern Britain but we do seem to get more frequent spells of two or three days of continual driving rain than I remember. We had one this week, it rained more or less continuously for 72 hours:

We had re-started re-jointing work on the Grange West Wall but that came to a shuddering halt for the duration of the rain: 

When it finally stopped on Sunday morning we had a brief spell of watery sun and, walking round the garden to survey the damage I found a remarkable sight by the pond. The rain had filled the pond to the level of the overflow and on a reed bunch the dragonfly larvae had crawled out of the water to hatch, I counted six of them.

One had hatched already and was warming up on a reed:

There's a slightly sad end to this story. About 5 minutes after taking this picture I noticed a starling eying up the dragonfly and soon it was in its beak heading over the hedge to feed a family.

Short life ....