{"id":1344,"date":"2007-06-16T12:09:24","date_gmt":"2007-06-16T11:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/?p=1344"},"modified":"2011-09-06T12:09:48","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T11:09:48","slug":"1662007-%e2%80%93-saturday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/1662007-%e2%80%93-saturday\/","title":{"rendered":"16\/6\/2007 \u2013 Saturday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grey day with a fair amount of wind about.\u00a0\u00a0 My friend Paul\u2019s been here the last few days and the weather hasn\u2019t been particularly hot or bright.\u00a0 Forecast is for dull changeable weather over the next few days as well, so I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll be going swimming in the Dordogne for the moment.<\/p>\n

On Thursday I went to Brive to meet Paul at the station.\u00a0 The train was 2 hours late. So I found myself with pretty much the whole afternoon to do something in Brive.\u00a0 I took the bike so it was easy getting around.\u00a0 First I went and sought out some junk shops and salvage places to see if I could get a window frame to match my others.\u00a0 I found an excellent second-hand shop that will probably fit the bill (although I didn\u2019t find the right size window).\u00a0 It had lots of gems of furniture and salvage in there and I\u2019ll definitely be going back at some stage.<\/p>\n

As luck would have it, I then found a bar that had free internet access so I spent the best part of an hour and ten minutes doing emaily things.\u00a0 I would have spent longer but my laptop battery runs out after an hour and ten minutes.\u00a0 Good value internetting though 2 beers for 4 euros and broadband internet \u2013 that\u2019s cheaper than the rip-off blokey in my local town, who doesn\u2019t even throw in any refreshments.<\/p>\n

After trawling round another junkshop and some other shops I went to pick Paul up.\u00a0 By now it was 7 o\u2019clock and as we both hadn\u2019t eaten we decided to eat in town.\u00a0 It should have been quicker eating there rather than driving the 40 minutes home and then cooking for 40 minutes, but we spent the best part of 40 minutes trying to find somewhere suitable to eat, and then a good 40 minutes waiting for the food, so in the end not a good decision.\u00a0 Drove home in an immense thunderstorm just to make Paul feel welcome.<\/p>\n

Since Thursday, we\u2019ve cunningly had a Friday and a Saturday agenda to fill.\u00a0 The days were squeezed in between the Thursday and the Sunday \u2013 again so as not to overtly confuse my Engleesh guest.\u00a0 We started with gusto on Friday by doing a pub-crawl of Beaulieu – this might not be a surprise to some \u2013 but it wasn\u2019t planned it just happened because we got caught in the rain after shopping.\u00a0 And I say pub crawl, but there are only 4 proper bars in Beaulieu, so we went and sat in each of them one after the other.\u00a0 It also involved playing a few games of pool, but Paul seemed to go off that game when I kept winning and so he suggested table football.\u00a0 I\u2019m not so good at that (even Ilka beats me 10-nil at that) so I used my RSI and tennis elbow excuse to quell his enthusiasm for further games once the slaughter had begun.<\/p>\n

The weather was better on Saturday so we did some tourism.\u00a0 We started by touristing over to Autoire where I wanted to find the waterfall.\u00a0 We parked in the village and walked-up to it following the river.\u00a0 It was a difficult path in areas, particularly for Paul because he was wearing sandals \u2026. oh yeah and he\u2019s overweight and underfit!\u00a0\u00a0 But the waterfall at the end of it was magnificent, and well worth the mini trek.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/strong>We had a light liquid lunch and then headed for a local cave tour.\u00a0 At 2 o\u2019clock there was only one other person waiting to go into the cave, but their was a pensioner purporting to be a guide willing to take us down there anyway.\u00a0 It was only a small cave and the tour was only 40 minutes, but there were some fantastic mites and tites in all their stalac glory.\u00a0 All in all a very interesting cave visit, even though our guide only spoke French in a school masterly fashion and kept reeling off loads of facts & figures.\u00a0\u00a0 Repeat after me; stalactites grow at the rate of 1 to 2 centimetres every 100 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Came home via the supermarket and then continued our marathon petanque<\/em> game which we had started earlier, now helped by a weed-free driveway.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to tell you who won, it would be immodest and anyway I had the home advantage.\u00a0 Paul\u2019s forfeit was to cook which was all very lovely for me (the sous-chef) and after eating a lovely meal (made successful by the quality of the potato peeling I think) we went into town to discover Saturday nightlife.<\/p>\n

The nightlife was a heavy-metal band that played all sorts of covers, but the locals seemed to be enjoying themselves bopping around with Gaye Abandon in the packed bar.\u00a0 (insert joke here!)<\/p>\n

And although we didn\u2019t bop, we enjoyed ourselves all the same.<\/p>\n

Got home and I felt sufficiently enthused to pick-up the guitar and try a few riffs of my own.\u00a0 Paul, being an ace guitarist, couldn\u2019t allow me too much of this indulgence though, and I think my version of Smoke on The Water<\/em> tipped him over the edge.\u00a0 He was kind enough to critique my attempts though, but I\u2019m far too modest to record them here.\u00a0 Instead he showed me the basics of guitar technique, so that should I ever be compelled to pick the instrument up again in public there shouldn\u2019t be any diplomatic incidents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grey day with a fair amount of wind about.\u00a0\u00a0 My friend Paul\u2019s been here the last few days and the weather hasn\u2019t been particularly hot or bright.\u00a0 Forecast is for dull changeable weather over the next few days as well, so I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll be going swimming in the Dordogne for the moment. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-in-france-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}