Over the past week or so, I've been noticing a lot of loud birdsong when I go out for walks with Tasha the Sheltie, especially early in the morning. Yesterday I opened the kitchen window at about 7:00 a.m. to checke if it was raining and again was struck by how melodious all the loud chirping was. Here's a brief sample — you'll need the sound on your device or computer turned on to hear it of course. Birdsong only and some woodpecker hammering, that's all you'll hear.
As far as I know, Blogger doesn't "host" audio files, so I took a movie. Not much action, but a good bit of noise. The one bird I didn't catch on this video is the cuckoo, which has come back from Africa... more than one of them, of course. Often, there's one sitting in the top of our big cedar tree cuckoo-ing its lungs out this time of year. Here are some posts about cuckoo birds, and one includes a short video on which you can hear the cuckoo's call.
We left the gîte du Riou in Le Puy (Auvergne) at about nine o'clock on that Saturday morning, March 9, and stopped to spend an hour or two in Brioude, which I've been blogging about for more than a week. Then we got in the car and drove the 3½ hours to Saint-Aignan on the autoroute. I was going to do a slideshow of some of the photos I took along the way, but instead I've decided to post just three images.
About 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of Brioude, and on the southern edge of the town called Issoire, we drove past the place called Le Broc. The Wikipédia article about the village says that about 700 people live there. At Le Broc, there's a hilltop medieval castle that's now in ruins, there's a medieval priory called La Commanderie de Chassaing, and there's also a prehistoric dolmen. Plus there's an airport. The priory is the tall, rectangular building you see in the foreground of my photo.
This second place is a town not far north of Le Broc, where the Couze Chambon river flows under the autoroute and into the Allier river, which is itself a tributary of the Loire. The village is called Montpeyroux and is one of the plus beaux villages de France. It's another place I'd like to see, but there are so many of those in France that, well, good luck! Maybe someday. Here's the page about Montpeyroux on the official Plus Beaux Villages web site, and it includes a short photo gallery showing the local sights.
And finally, here's a photo taken much farther north, when we were in the Berry province northeast of the Auvergne. This is the magnificent Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Bourges seen from the autoroute as we drove by at about 80 mph, at a distance of about four miles (nearly 7 km). Ignore the two water towers (châteaux d'eau), including the one that partially blocks the view of the cathedral, which soars over the town. Bourges is a small city, pop. 66,000, located about 90 minutes west east of Saint-Aignan by car. (See my comment about east vs. west below.)
In early March 2019, Walt and I drove down to the Haute-Loire area, at the source of the Loire in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France, for a short stay there in a gîte rural. A gîte [zheet] is a vacation rental out in the country. Most gîtes are not really luxurious; they are usually fairly rustic and full of character. The one at Le Riou in Le Puy was one of the nicer gîtes ruraux we've ever stayed in, and we've been staying in them all around France since 1993. (Of course, we always joke that our house in Saint-Aignan is the nicest gîte we've ever stayed in — we've been here for 16 years now.)
We arrived on a Monday late in the afternoon, and we checked out on a Saturday morning, meaning we had five nights in the gîte. It cost us less than $500, and the owners welcomed us with our dog Tasha. We could cook, so we didn't go to restaurants at all (we take prepared, frozen, or easy-to-prepare food with us in a cooler). As you can see, we had a full and fully equipped kitchen and a big living room downstairs, as well as a WC (half-bath). The gîte has under-floor heating downstairs along with a wood-burning stove (wood supplied for free). There was covered parking, and a set of patio furniture was available but it wasn't warm enough in early March for us to be tempted to use it. Oh, and there was satellite TV and a fast and very stable internet connection (fibre optique!)
Upstairs there were three bedrooms, two of which we didn't need to use. One had two single beds. The full
bathroom with a good shower (and another WC) was upstairs too.
I liked the way two of the bedrooms had built-in closets — I think they might have been old wooden wardrobes that had been fitted into the walls. The third bedroom had a nice wardrobe too. Everything was spotlessly clean and comfortable. We never needed to use the electric radiators in the bedrooms upstairs, but we did use
the towel warmer in the bathroom. We ended up not paying anything extra
for electricity.
The house, we learned, was the house that the owners — a brother and sister in their 60s, I'd say — were born and grew up in, and it's attached to an old stone barn. The brother lives in the more modern house you can see across the way in one of the first photos in the slideshow. He was available to help us with things if we needed him, but we didn't, and the only time we saw him was on arrival and again on departure. The sister lived in a village a few miles away, she said. The owners don't speak English, and they were relieved to find out that we spoke decent French. In the big yard between the gîte and the one owner's house there was a flock of chickens. We enjoyed farm-fresh eggs during our stay. However, we were only about two miles from the center of the city of Le Puy-en-Velay, and close to a modern shopping area.
We were back in Saint-Aignan by mid-afternoon that Saturday in March, after having spent a good part of the morning in Brioude. The weather cooperated, and we had just a little bit of rain on the 3½ hour drive on autoroutes past Clermont-Ferrand (home of Michelin tires), Monmarault (Callie's "home town" — remember Callie?), Saint-Amand-Montrond (at the geographical center of France), Bourges (fantastic cathedral), Vierzon (a railroad town), and then on east to Saint-Aignan.
Here a last couple of photos of the Basilique Saint-Julien in Brioude. They somehow never appeared in the posts I've done over the past week. I guess they are a little redundant, but here they are quand même. The tour group above is the group I followed into the church and tried to sidestep as I was taking photos.
Below is a last Brioude slideshow. The church is the star of it. Today is Sunday, after all. It's just eight photos I had left over. The first one shows that same tour group as the group entered the basilica. In other photos, you can see from the outside some of those contemporary stained-glass windows that were installed in the church in 2008.
I wouldn't mind going back to Brioude one day. There are several châteaux in the area, as well as some religious buildings including La Chaise-Dieu. But I'll probably never go back. We've been to the Auvergne three times over the past 10 years. The first trip, in 2009, was to the Cantal, which is the southwestern part of the region. We went with our friends Evelyn and Lewis, and their friend Linda. We had a great gîte, enjoyed the town of Salers, drove up to the top of a mountain, the Puy Marie (in the rain), walked out into a pasture to see the cows being milked (stepping carefully), and went to a dairy farm to see the cheese-making process. In 2018, Walt and I spent a few days in the Allier, in northeast Auvergne. And then this year the Haute-Loire, in southeast Auvergne. It has all been fun, but it's time to move on to other regions for our mini-vacations.
