Dhuizon

On our way to Chambord on Saturday, after stopping in to see the church at Fontaines-en-Sologne. we started seeing people standing out along the side of the road as if they were waiting for a bus to pick them up. We were far out in the country, so it was remarkable and mysterious to see these old couples standing out there just waiting and watching.

Exterior and interior shots of the church
at Fontaines-en-Sologne. You can see the
name plates on the backs of the pews.

When we arrived at Bracieux, the town just south of Chambord, there were many more people standing along the side of the road. We realized there must be an event in the making. Then a gendarme stopped the small group of cars we happened to be in and we saw several vans and then some classic cars drive by the in the opposite direction, escorted by a blue gendarmerie van with lights flashing.

The painted window of a salon de coiffure
shows an animal common in the Sologne,
the sanglier or wild boar

At first I thought it was a classic-car rally, but Chris recognized it as a bike race. There were many vans, some rented from SuperU, in the cortege. After 12 or 15 cars and vans went by, the gendarme moved aside and let us proceed. But in Bracieux, we found ourselves caught in a little traffic jam of about 20 cars. I was able to turn left and head east out in the the Sologne forest to avoid the clog.

A Logis de France hotel/restaurant in Dhuizon

We ended up in the village called Dhuizon, which I had driven through several times before. It's just east of Chambord, by maybe 15 km/9 mi. We stopped and walked around for a few minutes, and I took some pictures. Dhuizon is a typical Sologne town and is very pretty. I had always wanted to stop there, but hadn't had the chance. We were lucky with the weather on Saturday, too. It was clear, not cold or windy, with big puffy clouds overhead against a blue sky.

A café in Dhuizon, in a typical Solognot building.
Just as I snapped the picture, a young man threw open
a window and yelled "Cheese!"

We later saw posters announcing a bike race called Le Tour du Loir-et-Cher (our département) and realized that was the event we had gotten caught up in. We never did see the cyclists.

This morning the rain is really coming down. And yesterday it was very gray and showery all day, with steady rain starting to fall by late afternoon. So far, this is not the April I had hoped for, weather-wise.

Say "cheese"

Have some cheese. We went to the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan yesterday morning and stood in line at the cheese vendor's stand to get some nice fromages for lunch.

Cheeses from the market

Clockwise from the top, these are:

1. tomme de Savoie (in the Alps)
   
2. camembert de Normandie
   
3. chèvre de Mareuil-sur-Cher (near Saint-Aignan)
   
4. ossau iraty du pays Basque (SW France)
   
5. pur brebis de Corse (Corsica)
   

It's a kind of Tour de France of cheeses, and all of them are delicious. Nos. 1 and 2 are made from cow's milk. No. 3 is made from goat's milk. Nos. 4 and 5 are ewe's milk cheeses.

In the afternoon we took a drive up through the Sologne to Chambord, stopping along the way in the village called Fontaines-en-Sologne to look around in the church there. A lot of the pews in the church have little plaques, reserving them, I guess from the people who usually occupy them. I liked this one:

Plaque on a pew in a church in Sologne

I bet a lot of people would like to have that name.

News on France Inter radio this morning: President Sarkozy's approval rating as fallen to 36%, the lowest score for a French president since the 1950s, when de Gaulle came in and set up the Fifth Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy has been in office less than a year, and the least you can say is that he hasn't gotten off to a strong start.

Tours — the town, not the activity

One of the realities of life in Saint-Aignan is that from time to time we need to go to Tours, a city of 200,000 about 40 miles west of us, to find and buy some special item that we just can't get in our small town. We went yesterday and we got to take our first-ever ride on the new autoroute from Saint-Aignan to Tours, which shortened the travel time by nearly half (and lightened the porte-monnaie by €3.70 for the toll).

Old houses on the Place Plumereau in old Tours

One item we can't get in Saint-Aignan, and the reason for our trip, is paint in custom-mixed colors. Our hardware stores here (Bricomarché and Mr. Bricolage) don't mix paints. You can only buy the colors that they happen to have on their shelves at any give time. So yesterday we took a trip to Tours with our current visitor, Chrissou P. from California. Chrissou has spent a lot of time in France so I don't think she felt that this was time wasted that she could have instead spent sightseeing. (At the same time, I'm sure it wasn't all that exciting for her.)

More church art — a carved figure
on the exterior wall of a church in Tours

We are planning to paint our kitchen over the next two or three weeks. That's another reality of life in Saint-Aignan. Our house still needs some decorating touches, and the kitchen is a room we have long hestitated to start renovating. The scraping and sanding and emptying of cabinets will mean that we won't have use of the kitchen for several days... if not weeks, because we don't work very fast.

But since we also don't work and have plenty of time, and since the dollar is extremely low, we try to do redecorating work of this type ourselves rather than hire someone to do it. We've repainted two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the entryway, and our big living/dining room over the past four years.

One wall in the kitchen, cabinet doors taken down.
We have to move all this stuff out now.

Anyway, despite a snappy, exasperated (and exasperating) salesman at the Leroy Merlin store (a kind of Home Depot or Lowe's) we got what we wanted and in a quantity that we think will do the job. When we finish, the kitchen walls will be Mexican Yellow. We also bought some new hardware for cabinet doors. Doors are off some of the cabinets and it's time to start emptying them and scraping and sanding the walls.

For some color, here's a picture ofthe restaurant where we had lunch in Tours

After the DIY excursion, we drove into the old center of Tours (the big-box stores are in the suburbs, of course) for lunch. And after a lunch salads, we took time to walk through the oldest part of the city, which is the restaurant-y and student-y Place Plumereau neighborhood. For once, it wasn't raining (yet).

The rain came in a hour or so later, as we were driving back to Saint-Aignan through Montlouis, Amboise, and Chaumont-sur-Loire. We took the river road, and noticed that the Loire has a lot of water in it at this season. That's not surprising, because it hasn't stopped raining here in France for months and months.

Statues in churches, IV

This one is in the church at Saint-Genou, where the building that remains is just a small part of a once much bigger church that was at the center of a Benedictine abbey. The abbey was founded in the year 828 but attacked and demolished by the Normans twice in the 800s and 900s. Construction on a "new" church was started in 994 and completed in 1066. The Saint-Genou monastery went into decline in the 1500s. Rabelais was a regular visitor, and Saint-Genou is mentioned in his works.

The name Genou in Saint-Genou is not related to the French word for "knee" except by phonetic coincidence.