Lost in a labyrinth

Here's the only picture I managed to take in the town of Montmorillon last Monday. I took it before we had the delicious but debilitating lunch that kept us up most the first night at the gîte in Vindelle.

The bright sunlight was obviously too intense for my Android tablet's camera.

The drive from Montmorillon to Angoulême was 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) and took about two hours. We still felt good and the drive was mostly uneventful. The only odd thing about it was all the convoys of big rigs (poids lourds) that were driving away from Angoulême and toward either Limoges or points north, including the Paris region. We didn't count, but there might have been 100 trucks in all. We were glad we weren't stuck behind them. There were few if any big trucks going toward Angoulême.

Above is a map that shows Saint-Aignan at the top and Angoulême at the bottom, as well as the route we drove when we left Montmorillon that afternoon. On it you can see major cities including Nantes, Tours, Bourges, Limoges, and La Rochelle, so that you can orient yourself.

When we arrived at Angoulême, all went smoothly as far as finding our way off the major N10 (la nationale dix) road was concerned, and then on to an Angoulême suburb that has the unusual name of Saint-Yrieix, just south of where our gîte was located. The Gîtes de France reservations staff had sent us paperwork giving us the address of the gîte in Vindelle, the owners' address and phone numbers, and so on. On that paper, there was this information: Pour l'accès à votre location — location means rental, as does gîte — En arrivant de St Yrieix, tourner à droite en face de l'église puis prendre la 1ère à gauche. (Yrieix is pronounced, I think, as [ee-ree-ex] or maybe [ee-ree-ay].

When we arrived at the church in Saint-Yrieix we turned off the main road and ended up in some kind of industrial zone in which there were many businesses with suburban subdivisions scattered all around. We kept following signs but running into dead ends where we had to turn back and try again. We stopped at a pharmacy and I went in and asked if somebody could help me find the way to Vindelle, or at least out of the labyrinth we were in. The first employee I spoke to was clueless. She went and found another employee, who came out and started searching for directions to Vindelle on the computer behind the counter.

She wrote out a series of instructions that filled an entire page and listed 6 or 8 roundabouts and which roads off of each of those we should take — the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on. It looked like it would be a two-hour trip! So off we went again, and soon we were lost and encountering more dead ends. Two men were standing and talking at the front gate of house in a subdivision we found ourselves lost in, so we stopped and I asked them for help. They told us about the most direct route we could take, but warned us that they thought that road was closed because of construction work. They were nice but had nothing more to offer us.

Can you tell that we don't have GPS in the Citroën? Finally we found our way on our own. It had only taken about an hour after we got off the main highway on the north side of Angoulême to drive the 5 miles to Vindelle. It was frustrating but comical at the same time. We arrived at the gîte at just past five o'clock, which was the appointed check-in time. The owners were waiting for us and were very informal, friendly, and helpful. Look at Walt's blog for some gîte pictures.