Sunday, August 27th – Day Twelve – Angouleme to Riberac

Another Sunday, and sadly Riberac , like Blain, is suffering from an outbreak of permanently closed down shops. However, unlike Blain, it does have a few decent restaurants open on a Sunday in August, so we ate extremely well.

We left Angouleme early, but hit an immediate problem when Tyrant Jane decided to ignore our programming! Perhaps thinking we could save time by travelling on the Peripheries? This took us about ten, extremely fast and dangerous, miles out of our way and caused a great deal of distress to aching Husband legs ( and temper – he says she is going to get  her first written warning!). I was pretty fed up too because I felt the need to either wait at each roundabout or, when that was impossible, do the complete circuit and go back down the same road again to the previous roundabout in order to check that John was okay!

Shortly after leaving the peripheries and finally feeling we were on our way, I got an urgent call to come back – the bike had suffered its second puncture of the trip and assistance was needed – indeed the whole car was needed as it is currently a mobile bicycle repair shop! As this includes two spare wheels the immediate problem was easily dealt with.

The inner tube replacement last night was also handled with great expertise – evidently, it is much easier than switching on a mobile phone!

Once on our real way we went back to the little country roads, which are a lot prettier and much more varied than the semi-motorways we have been using for the past three days.

The down-side is that the routes are considerably more complicated so I have to stop every ten minutes, or at every road junction, to make sure Husband is still on the right road – and go back and get him if not!

We are now approaching the bottom of the Charentes Region and already the colours are changing, although the fields are still French butter white, the trees and hedgerows have more brown leaves, there are brown cows in the fields and the poor sunflowers are burnt to a crisp, many have black stalks and black leaves as well as mournful drooping black faces and I wonder what is left in them to harvest now?

They are clearly a key crop, Charentes vineyards all have at least one field of sunflowers where in Tuscany there would be olive bushes. The fields are much flatter than the vineyards that I am used to seeing, the grapes varieties very different, and no pointed cypresses waving in the woods – they are all deciduous trees – and sometimes not very many of them at that!

We had morning coffee at a little village called Villebois Lavelette, which had a Bastide’s Chateaux on the hilltop and a simply gorgeous Halles Merce – covered market, which must have challenged its architect not a little – being set into a groove in the hillside!

All went well until a tiny town called Allemans, which had one extremely narrow Main Street with a slalom traffic calming system. There was nowhere to stop so I went straight through town and out the other side, inevitably with a couple of cars behind me eager to get a move-on, so I stopped a bit further beyond town than usual and the town was based on another steep hill I figured Husband would be about ten minutes behind.  Big mistake! After ten minutes I painstakingly found a place to manoeuvre a U turn and tried to find him – only to get the “where are you?”call from an angry husband already waiting in Riberac ……I had missed him going past me….as he had already worried that I would do once I got my nose stuck in a book!

So…another palpable hit for Husband …I am going to get a written warning too…and another avenue of pleasure will have to be closed off!

Our stopover tonight in Riberac is in a Chambres D’Hotes called Chambes de la Fontaine, nice room, great shower but no hairdryer….! We ate dinner in a delightful restaurant called Le Citronnier where the food was French and delicious but the owner and strangely  all the other customers were also English!

Tomorrow Bergerac and more wine and ice cream!