Overnight the rain came down most of the night as far as we can remember and in the morning it was grey and damp. The choice was to stay in bed the whole day or go out and do something which is what we did.
We left the site around 1030 am and headed off via Rocamadour, the village that hangs on the side of a cliff, before passing Turene ( another beautiful French town) where we arrived in Brive. Our only memories of Brive from the past is when we used to take the Car/Train from Boulogne down to Perpignan and it used to stop in Brive around 0500 am in the morning for those people wishing to visit the Dordogne to get off. This service used to run prior to the building of the excellent French motorway network where trains carrying cars are not really used today.
Brive old town is surrounded by less a interesting housing area and then you come to the Hypermarkets of Decathlon, International Sports, Carrefour etc and so as our intention was to stay out of the rain and visit the large superstores this is what we did. We have also been looking at purchasing some fold up bikes so that we can take them away with us on our trips but when talking to people on the site who have them you would need to be careful when purchasing to ensure that it is fully usable. An English guy across the road from us had a really good lightweight fold up but the negatives were it had no gears and because for weight saving it had a neoprene chain you cannot stand on and push down the pedals as it would strip the neoprene chain, so we do not want one like that. In Decathlon we saw a B-Twin bike which appears at first glance to be all that we need with easy gearing and quite light and comes complete with mudguards etc. The price here was Euro 249.99 and later when checking to see if the bike is available in the UK it was at £ 249.99 and so with the Euro against the pound at the moment it would be about £ 30.00 cheaper to by it here. No decision yet in this direction.
We then went next to Carrefour and they also had a fold up bike but much heavier and less efficient in many ways but it was only Euro 129.00 and also of a much lower quality and perhaps no spares availability in UK which the B-Twin would have. Jennifer then purchased a small back pack for our forthcoming Spanish holiday and it was marked at Euro 11.99 on the rack but when we came to check out they wanted 17.50 Euros. So after lots of gesticulating and using our best English they got the hang of the problem and after ten minutes we got back the overcharge and also an apology card for 3 Euros to spend.
Back home via Brive Old town where parking seems very difficult indeed unless you have very small car, the Land Cruiser is not a small car, and so we continued home and after a while got stuck in a traffic jam which we though had been caused by an accident as there were quite a few police around and then it became clear it was part of a cycle race, I don't think it was the Tour de France, and there were quite a few people at the side of the road clapping and cheering and so with true English tradition Noel used his best Prince Philip wave and shouting Merci through the open car window, This did cause some humour amongst the local population and was just a bit of fun.
We stopped in Gramat at the supermarket for some fish and as it was still a little cool still we also cheated and bought some oven chips and so tonight we had Fish and Chips and peas with some excellent Benedictine Tarter sauce with a glass of two of white wine.
We decided to watch another film tonight and then the DVD started playing up again and so perhaps it's not the DVD disk at fault but the DVD player in the TV ,damn and all that chasing around Cahors the other day may have been a waste of time.
Oh well the weather is promised to be better tomorrow and also four of our closest neighbours are leaving tomorrow and so we could soon be having the site to ourselves almost.
