Our Sunday night was as quiet as (St Nicholas de) la Grave. We drove away across La Garonne river on a narrow bridge that Janice had to get out in front of me and guide me through. It’s strange that you can look at a gap and think, ‘there’s no chance of getting through there’, and then actually manage to get through it. There were no prior signage or measurements of the max width! Anyway, we made it through.
We decided to have a brief stop over in Agen and parked outside of the town to cycle in along the river. Agen is the prune capital of France. It’s another strange thing that prunes are something I disliked as a child but love now. They remind me of school dinners where most people didn’t like them but someone (not me this time) would eat all the prunes as a bit of a dare from everyone else’s plate and count up all the stones as measure of courage. I don’t know what the effects were later, maybe it had a serious consequence?
Guess what I had with my breakfast today! We looked up the method of making plums into prunes. It involves drying them in a warm oven for 8 hours or using a specific dehumidifier for about 14 hours. We think we will just continue to buy them in the packets.
Agen wasn’t the greatest of our visits......it was rather shabby chic with the emphasis on the shabby.
They do have some pleasant buildings.....the Art Museum has a few Goya paintings and the Cathedral had a lovely interior, better than the outside. It did satisfy our curiosity so we moved on.
In contrast our next visit was a medieval village on a hill called Pujols. It is another possible starting point for people walking the Santiago de Compostela pilgrims walking route but as far as I can ascertain everywhere is on the route!
Looking at the photo leads me to my next question. Where are all the French people. Either there are loads of people or there are none. I understand about the French having long lunches and about shops closing at lunchtime but it seems to me that they only move around on public for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon....it gets busy then it’s deadly quiet. Pujols was voted one of the most beautiful villages in France but nobody was there! In mid afternoon sunshine the shops and cafes were shut.....I don’t blame them for shutting because there were no people to serve but maybe if they stayed open the people might think about coming. It’s a chicken and egg problem. I also know that the French all go on holiday in August but in the UK we have all year round tourism and certainly our tourist locations are well frequented throughout the year, especially if it is dry and there is a glimmer of sunshine. I don’t mind having a beautiful medieval village for our own use but it’s also nice to be able to buy an ice cream when the urge arises.
Our overnight location was even quieter......it was so quiet it actually was a graveyard!
The very small village of Ribagnac is south of Bergerac and was totally deserted. We cycled around and I later walked around and never saw anyone except a lady who was tending one of the graves at the church. She can’t have been local because she asked if I was local. The car park next to the church was a great place to stay overnight. We did get out and cycle the area and found the Chateau Bridoire that actually seemed to have some people visiting. This area seems to be the north end of the plum and walnut growing area and the southern part of the Bergerac wine area, so if you are a nutty person who speaks with a ‘plum’ in their mouth and enjoys a drop of the red grape juice this is the place for you!.....and if you are then I suppose your movements will certainly be ‘regular’.
Tuesday. We moved up to Brantôme, a place we have visited once before. Well worth a second visit.
You can tell that the weather is cooler.....I have my long trousers on. We recommend the town, nice size, pretty river and church, with a bit of everything...and some of the shops and cafes were open.....shock! Of the few people that walked around we head more English voices than French (it’s half term in the UK this week). We bimbled around and browsed some shops.
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