Pictures from a walk along the Vendée river...

...near the gîte. We arrived in very good weather on a Saturday afternoon in October. This is the house we had rented for the week. I took walks on Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning, with my camera.

Like many French départements (counties, more or less), the Vendée is named for the river that runs through it. It looked like this near the gîte. The path was for hikers and cyclists, and closed to cars. It runs for more than a kilometer and was a nice place to go for walks with Tasha.

Because the sun was shining brightly, the colors and contrasts were beautiful. I don't know what these red berries are, but they were pretty against the reflective river. The Vendée is a very slow-moving river here.

Lichens on a very big tree trunk caught my eye. The yellow ones are especially attractive.

At one point, I noticed a patch of mushrooms growing by the path.

At another point, cows and several calves were grazing in a pasture on the opposite bank of the Vendée river. There were just a few other people out walking, and a few on bicycles, and a few fishing along the riverbank. It was all very peaceful and bucolic, even though the gîte was only four miles from the center of the big town of Fontenay-le-Comte (pop. 25,000 or more).

Much ado about weather

When I told the man who owns the gîte we stayed in near Fontenay-le-Comte, in the Vendée, that we had stopped in the town of Esnandes, he seemed surprised. I didn't ask him why. We had been in La Rochelle earlier in the day, trying to enjoy walking around with our cameras and with the dog on a leash. It seemed like it would be more fun outside the city, where we'd find wide-open spaces.

Many of these fishing piers along the Atlantic coast of France washed away in big storms back in 1999 and again in 2010.

Traveling with a dog is very different from traveling without a dog. There are many things you just can't do because dogs are allow inside building, and there are things that otherwise would be easy and pleasant that become logistically difficult. We figure if we're going to keep a dog, we need to adapt our lives to the animal's needs, at least to some degree.

I've mentioned a couple of times that there were a lot of birds feeding on the mudflats

 in the Baie d'Aiguillon. You can see some of them in this photo.

The weather that day — October 22 — was gorgeous. You can see that from the photos I've been posting. We were so lucky — it could have been chilly and rainy the whole time we were out on the coast. Next week, I'll be posting photos I took a couple of days later of the beaches on the Île de Noirmoutier, a little farther north.

I wonder what this thing is? A road to nowhere? Or what's left of a stone path that people

could walk on to cross the mudflat at low tide and get out to deep water?

Speaking of weather, I should note how strange it is here in Saint-Aignan and in nearly all of France right now. Here we are in December and our morning low temperatures are about the same as we we would expect in summertime. Afternoon temperatures are not much different from early morning temperatures. And it's rainy (but that's normal).

This is the only boat I remember seeing on the bay that day...

I might have mentioned in a comment this week that I was talking to a local grape-grower out in the vineyard a few days ago. I said we were having pretty nice weather. Yes, he agreed, but it needs to be colder. If we have another warm, wet winter, it won't be good for the grapes or for plants and trees in general. He said swarms of gnats were driving him crazy as he tried to work on pruning the vines. In December, swarms of gnats! Weird.

Mud, rocks, marshes... and storms

So there was no beach, or at least no sandy beach, at the edge of the Baie d'Aiguillon at Esnandes. There was a rocky shore. You wouldn't want to walk on it bare-footed. The tide was very low when we were there.

Along that shore, there were several of these high wooden piers (below) equipped with big square nets used catching small fish, shrimp, and crabs (I imagine). The nets are lowered into the water, presumabley at high tide, and after a while they are pulled back up by their edges, scooping up anything that has walked or swum onto them.

There were a lot of birds feeding on the mudflat. I didn't get very many good pictures of them because they mostly weren't close to the shore. There was however a sign near the shore that showed a lot of them, and explained how they used their long beaks to find, catch, and open mollusks, for example, or eat worms and other creatures that live in the mud and water.

Looking across the bay toward the north, on the horizon you could see a very very thin strip of land with trees and houses on it. My long-zoom camera lens could "see it better than could my naked eye.

The Baie d'Aiguillon is the estuary through which the slow-flowing Sèvre Niortaise river flows into the ocean. A decade ago in late February, a very violent storm — une tempête — a cold-weather hurricane, really — which was given the name Xynthia, came ashore here. We remember it well, because we felt the effects all the way back in Saint-Aignan. Two plum trees in our back yard were uprooted by high winds, and a dozen heavy concrete roof tiles went flying off our roof.

On the coast, the storm surge was devastating. It has been compared to a tsunami. As many as 50 people along this low-lying coast were killed, most of them in La Faute-sur-Mer (on the upper left corner of the Google Maps image above). For scale, I'll tell you that the town of La Faute is 11 miles northwest of Esnandes, which also suffered a lot of flood damage. In the storm's aftermath, the French government bought some 700 houses that had been built in zones that flooded during Xynthia and tore them down, in order to prevent such disasters in the future.

Easing into Esnandes

When we left La Rochelle after lunch, we decided to drive along the coast to get back to the gîte, which was more inland than coastal. Walking around in La Rochelle with Natasha on the leash hadn't been easy. We didn't go into the old city, which is made up of narrow streets that would be crowded with people on a sunny day, making it even more difficult with a dog. We wanted to see the real coastline, so we drove little roads north through the town of Esnandes, headed toward the bigger town of Luçon.

At Esnandes [ay-nawnd], Walt saw on the map that there was a road that ran straight west from the town and led to what might be a beach. We didn't know what to expect the coastline to look like. The weather was nice, and we imagined a walk on a strand of sand, with maybe some surf. The photo above shows where we ended up: on a sort of cliff overlooking what we didn't know then was the shallow body of water called the Baie d'Aiguillon.

The high ground was good because it gave us long views out over the bay, which at low tide was actually more of a wide mudflat rather than an expanse of pretty blue water. There were birds feeding on the mudflat, but there's weren't many boats and there certainly weren't any crowds. And no beach! Oh well.

Esnandes itself is a small town (pop. 2,000) on low flat land where the houses are also low and small. The Michelin Guide describes them as humbles maisons basses, chaulées ("modest low-roofed, whitewashed houses"), and says the people who live there are gens de mer — people who work on or around the water —and make their living from oysters and mussels. It was picturesque in its own way, but we didn't stop to take pictures. I kind of liked it, and it felt (and smelled) familiar.