Summer skies

Our visitors arrive today. Thanks to all the travel restrictions and lockdowns, they'll be our first visitors in two years, and they're driving down here from the Mont Saint-Michel. That's a four-hour drive, so we don't expect them until late afternoon. For days now, the weather services have been predicting heavy rains for today through Wednesday. This seems like it's going to be a very different summer in Saint-Aignan, after two or three summers that were unusually dry and fairly hot. Here's yesterday's sky as seen  from a bedroom window, looking west out over the vineyard.

The weather forecasts have reduced the amount of rain that they predict will fall on us over the next three days, but I don't expect it's going to be very sunny. We'll do the "grand tour" anyway, I think: Chambord, Blois, Chaumont-sur-Loire, Amboise, Vouvray, Chenonceau, and Montpoupon. The question is, will we try to do it tomorrow, or on Wednesday? The good news is that the forecast for the area visitors E. and E. be driving through today (Fougères, Laval, Le Mans, Tours, and on to Saint-Aignan) looks good — basically dry, at least before noon. Here's the forecast for the morning that I just saw on TéléMatin.

And here's the forecast for this afternoon. That big blob of rain coming in off the Atlantic Ocean is predicted to slowly cross the whole country from west to east today and tomorrow.