Last few days before our French house sit.

October 09, 2022

Saint-Flour

A small village with a population of 6,000, perched on a rocky overhang. This 1,000 year old town is nestled between Truyère gorges and the Mounts of Cantal and Margeride. We took a train here from Beziers - another scenic trip over mountain ranges, but the view of the village on arrival was the winner! We had to walk up there to our accommodation in the old quarters.

Clermont-Ferrand

We travelled to Clermont-Ferrand by train, nothing exciting. Our time here was mainly spent organising a SIM card for the cell phone. It was easier to buy another card (another phone number to remember) than to top up the Vodafone card that we purchased in Portugal - I thought Vodafone would be good, but they're useless!! This caused/allowed us to once again walk around the place. Once again came across a great mural- look closely to see what is real and what is painted on! This one is much harder to decipher what is real and what is painted!

Our accommodation here was entertaining! Had to go in a grotty old building with a real unused/untidy stairway! But entered into a clean small apartment with an extremely friendly and kind Arabic dancer/lecturer! We enjoyed the great Arabic breakfast that he cooked for us 😋

Montluçon

We caught a ride in a BlaBlaCar to Montluçon. This is organised using an App - like most things these days 🙂 Simple really - someone is planning to go from 'here to there' and have spare seats in their car, so a couple of days beforehand they post their journey on the App. Their journey pops up when we search that we want to do a similar journey. We pay some money through the App, arrange a meeting point and away we go. This one was €10 for an hours ride.

In Montluçon, we enjoyed a visit to the MuPop - an incredible collection of 3,500 musical instruments from the 18th century to the 90's. We wore a head piece and had a hand held pointer to be able to point at over 150 different instruments to hear the musical sound they made. A Hurdy-Gurdy - which is a string instrument from as early as the 10th century!

Plus a Serpent or 'The snake', a low pitched wind instrument.

Saint Amand-Montrond

We caught a bus to Saint Amand-Montrond and were lucky enough to get the front seats! Awesome countryside, green and lush. Crossed the canal a few times, saw lots of cattle out in the paddocks - white cattle, which we think are the Charolais breed.

We had a lovely stay at an artist's home, enjoyed a bit of luxury and a celebratory dinner out before beginning our month-long France house sit, which we have been excited about for over 6 months! Enjoyed a look at ruins of a castle, where Paul saw our first snake (about 1m long) and Canal du Berry which unfortunately is now not used. However, Paul predicts that in 20 years from now, when petrol and transport is astronomical in price they will reinstate the canals and use horses to pull the boats along!