Halfway through France House Sit

Reigny, Cher Province, FRANCE

Well we've been here two weeks already! Really enjoying our time here. We've had a mixture of at home days, cycling, walking and driving to places of interest. Have visited two great gardens.

Our favourite being a mediaeval inspired garden - Prieuré Notre-Dame d'Orsan.

Got some great ideas for ways to organise vegetable gardens! They use traditional by hand methods and are aiming to be pesticide free.

We also visited a beautiful mediaeval village Apremont-Sur-Allier and it's floral Park and castle.

We enjoyed a 3 hour bike ride with our neighbour Corinne- no English but our phone app and gestures made it a very enjoyable ride around our area - gorgeous quite roads and farm scenery, small villages - which are usually just a cluster if 5-10 houses.

Paul has had fun playing in the garden creating compost bins out of local bamboo and free pallets that I found locally. The house owners had given us a contact to buy pallets at a cost of 10 Euros each!!! But no we did it with free stuff! However it did entail us walking down the road 500m harvesting the bamboo and then carrying it back - about 4+ trips and heavy plus 6 metres long in bundles of ten!! Crazy kiwis!!

We went to our very small local community hall to a few social nights - games evening where Paul played an unusual snooker - French Snooker? Luckily he played with an Irish guy who lives in neighbouring village so had english!  The following night we listened to a young band(pop concert) of two guys called ' The Poppy Club'. Both nights had about 15 people attend. Was a nice evening enjoyed trying to talk to locals and a local aperitif platter.

We also cycled to a Goat Farm where they make goat cheese. They kindly gave us a tour and we got some of their cheeses aged from 2 weeks to 3 months. I loved being amongst the goats and Paul enjoyed learning about the Cheese making process.

The place was called Le Ferme des Chevres Feuilles - The Leaf Goat Farm 

http://fermechevresfeuilles.free.fr/.  

Then enjoyed happy hour on our return home, tasting the different cheeses!

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of cat crazy people here- we have now got three extra kittens to look after, til a home found for them... We don't quite agree with their thinking but not our decision,

We were interviewed by a local journalist for the regional paper - L'Echo du Berry. We are yet to get it translated! Unbeknown to us she included our blog in the article!!! Oh well, most locals can't speak French and we are not precious about our blog!

Below is a translation cleverly done by my big brother- Rick, using a Google Translator. Both the Google translator and the journalist lost some things in translation 🤣.