The only thing almost as good as growing our own veg is having someone else give you some of theirs that they’ve grown. This is the 2nd lot of tomatoes that we’ve had in the past week 🙂

This week we took Mika, the motorhome, into the motorhome dealer in Caen to sort out a couple of very minor warranty issues, but more importantly to add air suspension to the rear axle.  As well as improving road handling and reducing sway, it will hopefully assist with moving some of the weight slightly to the front axle; the difference in road handling was noticeable when we picked up Mika for the journey back to Bagnoles, though we wont be quite throwing her into the corners like we can do with the golf…

We have a display control unit to control the pressure in both sides of the rear air suspension so I guess it is more a pump up my ride 🙂

Do you ever have times when you don’t see many friends for a while, and then for a number of subsequent weekends you are blocked up seeing one friend after another?

We hadn’t had any visitors, apart from Gail’s parents who live here from time to time, until the last couple of weeks when we had Keith’s mum immediately followed by Gonzo; we dropped one off at Dinard airport and picked up the next – talk about conveyor belt… 🙂  It did help as it’s about a 2 hour drive so it saved a bit of travel time.

A week later we had Stevie B and family stop over for the night on Saturday on their way down to their summer holiday.

It was great to see them all.  It will be the last lots of visitors we have here in Normandy as we now only have about 4 1/2 weeks here and 10 days of that will be on a trip to Brittany…

Not bad for a mornings work, with the obligatory homemade rolls as well 🙂

I know that beetroot chocolate cake sounds strange, but it is very moist and tasty, you can’t taste the beetroot!!!

All,

Although there are 1000’s of travel  books and internet sites about places to go and see when we are travelling around Europe, which we will use to a degree, we thought that we might as well tap into the personal knowledge of our friends and family 🙂

As such if there are any outstanding places that you have been to on your holidays or trips to Europe, generally outside of main cities as we can do these on city breaks, then can you please let us know and we’ll add then to our list of potential places to do?

Thankyou

This was started in France to celebrate the amateur music artists, who perform free on this day at various locations around France; maybe in some other places now as well.

There were about 4 sites within Bagnoles itself in the evening, all of which we visited.  As with all of these things, not all the music is to everyones taste, but there was a very good duo that played in front of the Lake 🙂

Last night the club where we play tennis here in Bagnoles de L’Orne had a social event which about 55 people attended.  Obviously being in France they did a Paella… however, the Camembert was very local, French and fantastic 🙂

Gail had brought 5 raffle tickets for a total of 10Euros and we had already won 2 prizes before the big prize, which was drawn last.  This was for a TV, but as we had already won a few prizes and are going to be in the motorhome, we told them to redraw the prize.  As luck would have it one of our companions opposite on our table won it and was very happy; we didn’t lose out completely as he brought a bottle of bubbly to celebrate 🙂

Later on they even put the England v Italy game on without the sound on, midnight over here, just a shame about the result…

Whilst we are in the house in France our 2nd TV to enable World cup viewing, without annoying Gail, happens to be in the motorhome… game on 🙂

…

I think Keith still has a long way to go to do a push up…  Still, it is one of his challenges 🙂

I’m not sure how much you have seen/heard regarding the severe storms and hail that Europe had at the beginning of the week, but we were relatively lucky in Bagnoles.  Although there was alot of rain, and the storms were good, and the size of the hailstones were larger than normal, they were not like some areas had.  Apparently they were between a baseball and tennis ball size in some areas.  We saw the aftermath on the news as it was the headline, the damage was incredible;  I think that we can gladly say that we were lucky that we weren’t in Mika as she would have had a very sore head – some of them may well have gone straight through even though she has a reinforced roof…

However, after the storms, the last 3 days have almost been perfect summers days for us.  About 23-25C and lots of sun.  Who knows how many summer days we’ll have, so we made the most of it and had 3 consecutive BBQ’s.  And why not 🙂  We did mixed it up a bit; Chicken escalopes covered in a Dijon mustard, garlic and oil mix one evening, followed by sausages and homemade burgers the next and then Mackerel with a oil, garlic and rosemary mix this evening.  Hmm, mmm 🙂