Remember Saint-Aignan?

Yesterday afternoon we took Callie the collie to the vet for her first visite. She needed a booster shot of some sort (protection from several diseases and parasites) and we just wanted to talk to the vet about the dog's ongoing health care. Coincidentally, Walt had found a tick on the pup's leg. The vet quickly removed and disposed of that. It's Callie's third tick in a week.

The crypt of the Saint-Aignan church— really,
it's the old church that the "new" one is built on top of —
is decorated with these age-old frescoes.

When we left the vet's office, we drove a few hundred yards up the road toward Blois to pick up a cake or tart at the boulangerie-pâtisserie J.C. Robert, which is probably the best sweets bakery in the Saint-Aignan "metropolitan area." We bought a chocolate cream cake, but not especially for us — we had been invited to dinner by Janet and David, who were at our place last Sunday (pictures). We took dessert and some wine.

A view of the ruins of the old fort at Saint-Aignan from
the grounds of an abandoned religious institution across town.

Leaving the bakery, we wanted to stop for a minute at the Intermarché supermarket. Instead of making a U-turn and backtracking, I thought I'd take a little side road that would, I was convinced, loop around and take us back down toward the river and the shopping center where Intermarché is located.

The Renaissance wing of the privately owned château de Saint-Aignan.

Instead, we drove a few hundred yards past an old farmhouse that has just been nicely renovated, some old farm buildings on the other side of the little road that are in need of a bit of TLC, and then a couple of pavillons, houses of more recent vintage, with big front yards. The road climbed up a hill and suddenly went from pavement to gravel.

There was no telling where the gravel road led, so I had no choice but to turn back. As we did a three-point turn, we overlooked a beautiful field of red poppies in full bloom. And then we saw that we were up high enough to have a good view out across the Cher river valley and over to the château and the church in Saint-Aignan.

An old half-timbered building in Saint-Aignan

That reminded me that I hadn't posted any pictures of Saint-Aignan in a while. There are some here with this note.

And in a few minutes, I'm going to drive back across the river to Noyers-sur-Cher and up that little road again to take some pictures with the morning sun at my back.

Dog waiting on the sidewalk in Saint-Aignan
while its human does some shopping

It won't be a purely photographic outing, because just a mile or two farther up the road to Blois is the wine village called Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, where there is a cave coopérative, a grape-growers' co-op, that sells good local Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Franc, and Gamay wines. It'll be a nice opportunity to stock up one more time.