What a grey miserable day it is today and looks like it will rain soon. However we had an early start of to Gannat to find the launderette which is hidden in a side street in the main town.
What could be nicer than watching your 'smalls' twirling around the machine whilst the grey clouds passed overhead. Boy this is exciting stuff. This activity required a strong cup of coffee and so we found a small bar and watched the locals tossing back the cognac at about nine thirty in the morning. Better you than I 'Gunga Din'. One hour later we were done and we headed off for Carrefour shop in Vichy to do some food shopping. The choice of food in this shop is really incredible and the quality and quantity of the fresh fish and lobsters and crabs is quite amazing. We purchased some white looking fish called 'Julian' which we thought was a strange name for a fish as we thought all fish were female!!.
However whatever this name of the fish but together with rice and frozen veggies the result was excellent
A quick lunch from the Casino take away together with an excellent ice cream, still not as good as those in New Zealand, but passable. We returned to camp site and Noel tried to use the internet again but it was down yet again. Noel has know started aking in the middle of the night shouting out strange worlds like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and so perhaps the continual frustration is getting to him.
A
nice young English couple have camped almost next door to us and its their first visit to France and they really seem to be enjoying themselves which was nice to see. Just before bed we did our usual walk around the site to see who is new etc and we bumped in to another English couple who must have been demolishing the wine at a good rate as his nose lit up the campsite whilst his wife was miserable as sin. Oh it takes all types.
We watched a French film 'La Reine Margot' lots of blood and religious intrigue with the Catholics and the Protestants killing each indiscriminately just like they did in Northern Island some years ago. Religion has so much to answer for. When writing the BLOG about a Vichy trip some days ago I thought I would look up some history of the place but my first few attempts only drew my attention to the Vichy 'puppet government' and also they help the locals gave the Germans in finding the Jewish population to enable them to visit the concentration camps in Poland etc. All this was so depressing I gave up and concentrated on the pretty streets.
We need a world without racial and religious tension and we would all be much happier and safer.
Change of subject, when is Gordon Brown likely to go as I want to ring Paddy Power and place a bet.
You see what I mean the Launderette is exciting!!
