Animal Farm

So we lasted nine days 'on the farm'. Spiders and Silverfish were bearable (just), but then things got furry.

This is a Dormouse........
Note: This is a library picture of a dormouse as we were too scared to handle it ourselves, even for the sake of the blog!

Friendly looking critter huh? Well cute he may be frolicking in the fields and hedgerows, not so cute when he and the family Dormouse decided to make our living room their French retreat. So we left post haste and now we are on the road.

Its been a week or so since our last blog and to be honest we've been a little lazy. The thing is that when you don't have to do anything, you don't feel like doing anything. We have made vague attempts at exercise in an attempt to work off the after affects of the amazing French food we have been glutonnising every day but have now given up as we are now simply to heavy to even move.

We did take a trip to Perigueux (I must have typed that into a hotel search engine 10+ times and I still I spell it incorrectly). Quite a nice city (much nicer than Brive) which apparently used to be one of the biggest spots in Roman France. Anyway, much more importantly it now contains an obligatory Irish pub avec free wifi - they could build straight roads, but they couldn't bring you facebook!

Dan in front of the Temple de Vesone in Perigeuex. A monument to the City's Goddess.

As we said earlier we had not really done too much up until the last few days. Preferring to spend a lot of time unknowingly chilling with our vermin friends in the cottage. Our three top lazy french activities being:

1. Waving to frankly unimpressed cows:

2. Chestnut roasting on an open fire:

3. Avoiding the local French delicacy (aka Flopsy) in the supermarket

In the last few days we have moved around a little. Night one in a motel room outside Perigueux which reminded me of the final scenes of No Country for Old Men - not a positive memory for those who have seen the movie.

We then moved on and remain in a nice hotel just outside Sarlat. Sarlat itself is lovely - a sprawling medieval town, only problem being that we bring down the average tourist age to 72.

So rather than eat cakes and drink tea like the septuagenarian coach trip massive, we drove over to an endangered wildlife zoo thing which was very pleasant. A lot of the enclosures were built such that you walked through them...meaning that we could see and hear the anger in the lemur's growl as we disturbed them en coitus.

 

This looks like a Lemur who got what he want....

In fact it appears that the people that run this place take their role in species preservation seriously. Perhaps this Lemur behaviour was spurred on by little blue tablets in the food? Certainly the ant-eater (who sadly had no mate in sight) was ready to do his bit for the cause...:

note the fifth leg

So on Friday we will drive to Toulouse and drop off the car in anticipation of our flight to Rome on Saturday. Of course no holiday in France would be complete without some form of obligatory French strike, and kindly enough the whole country has decided to take an open-ended holiday to protest about removing retiree's benefit of free garlic or something. I'm sure Sarkozy will be more than happy to pay for any hotel rooms resulting from any delay!!

Speak to you all soon

Dan & Monali

Le Clos Roussillon

Cote de Roussillon

Vitrac

France