La petite ville de Bellême

Bellême (pop. 1,500) feels like a much bigger town than it is. It's only 20 minutes by car from Mortagne-au-Perche. Walt, our friends, and I spent a few hours there on a nice sunny day. People were obviously enjoying food and drink at an outdoor café. It was market day in the town, so that was fun. We had a good lunch in a restaurant. We were fascinated watching a crew of roofers working on an old building.

La ruralité (2)

When we were staying at the gîte in Mortagne-au-Perche, we could take a short walk

and get a close-up view of these cows and horses.

La ruralité (1)

The first gîtes ruraux in France were set up in the early 1950s, down in the Alps. Two realities motivated the creators of such vacation rentals. First, after WWII, French people were abandoning the countryside in droves and moving to urban areas. There were a lot of empty houses and other buildings that could be converted into gîtes for tourists from the cities.

I've always thought of staying in a gîte as one step up on the comfort scale compared to tent camping. Sometimes bed or bathroom linens are not included in the rental fee, or are an option you pay for. Instead of paying, we just take our own sheets and towels with us. We are traveling by car. We also usually prepare foods that we can take to the gîte in a cooler, keep in the gîte's refrigerator or freezer, and re-heat for our evening meals while we're there. Remember, we are usually traveling with our dog. Also more and more gîtes are now equipped with wi-fi connections and televisions, so you don't feel cut off from the world unless you want to be.

Here are some photos of the atmosphere and environment we enjoyed in our gîte just five miles from the center of Mortagne-au-Perche back in 2011. (I posted pictures of the interior of the gîte yesterday.) It was pretty comfortable as gîtes go — gîtes are more and more luxurious nowadays. They still cost a lot less than hotel rooms.

Le gîte à Mortagne

Here are a few random photos of the gîte we rented in Mortagne-au-Perche. There were five of us and there were three bedrooms as well as two bathrooms. The living room was not gigantic, but serviceable. Same with the kitchen. It was very private and just five minutes by car from the center of the town.

One last walk around Mortagne-au-Perche

I guess I'm posting too many pictures these days. Too many in the same post, in other words. The dilemma is, how many photos are enough? how many are not enough? It's like the old saw about letter-writing. I wanted to write you a short letter, but I didn't have time. So here's a long one. I don't have time to choose which pictures to post and which to put back in the archives. So I post too many... maybe. You can enlarge the ones you find interesting. You can just scroll through the others.

This morning, I thought I might have to break down and see if I could figure out why Blogger wouldn't work with Firefox any more. That might require a day's work or two day's work. Or I might never figure it out. Then, a hour ago, I started up Firefox for the day, opened the Blogger app, and everything worked the way it had until a few days ago. Somebody at Google fixed some bug while I wasn't looking, I guess. I'm glad I hadn't started messing with it.

So here are some more pictures that I took in Mortagne. It's amazing how there are no people in all these photos. Where were all of the nearly four thousand people who live in Mortagne? Hiding from me and my camera? Oh, that's my American friend Evelyn in one of the photos below. Enjoy.

Mortagne-au-Perche

Continuing my walk around the town of Mortagne-au-Perche...

Mortagne-au-Perche windows and doors

So what do you really see when you take a walk around a town like Mortagne? Or take pictures of? You do the walking for the exercise and for close views of everything. You take the photos for the memories. Doors and windows are often favorites subjects. Here are a few that I took back in August 2011.