France - Tusson and region

 We arrived at Carl's dad's house in Tusson at teatime on Saturday. We had a quick tour of the house as only Carl had been there before, then it was time for a BBQ tea outside. Lovely.

 On Sunday, after a lazy morning, we had an active afternoon. We hired kayaks from a nearby town and paddled down the river to a small village which I cannot remember the name of. It was lovely and sunny and nice easy paddling, until we came to what appeared to be a dead end with only weirs in front of us. We saw another group of people coming up behind us and decided to wait and see what they did. They were English and had about as much clue as we did. The only option appeared to be a small fork to the left but that looked like it was a weir too. On closer inspection of the map and instructions it did say to take a shoot to the left and to the left of the weir there was a shoot so we took it. It was correct, we didn't have to get out of our kayaks and wade out of the water.

We took a minute for Ellie to recover from the trauma of having spiders and river-boatmen in her kayak and then set off back to where we'd come from on bikes. There were a few uphill bits where I had to get off and push, but other than that it was easy cycling through pretty scenery. Most of the sunflower fields had their sunflowers turned down and dying but we found a few to stop and take pictures in. This is Caitlin before she realised there might be bees in the flowers, and before she'd decided she didn't like her bike cos she'd asked for a road bike like me when she really should have asked for a mountain bike!

 This region of France apparently closes on Mondays so we travelled to the nearest big town, Cognac, in the hope that some of the shops would be open. Hardly any of them were as they were all closed for a three hour lunch break. So we wandered around for a bit, bought drinks and ice creams and then went back to Tusson. Caitlin decided she wanted to go for a swim in a nearby lake with a beach but when we got there it had clouded over and she decided it was too dirty. We just paddled.

Then Tuesday arrived and the holiday was over. A six hour drive got us back to Le Havre and then on to Blighty. This is Caitlin trying to clean chocolate off the seat of her shorts. She'd sat in it for about three hours and it looked like she'd had a different sort of accident.