In which Sid and Doris idle away a day walking around the town, seeing the docks and writing.
Every afternoon Sid and Doris shower, do laundry, drink, write, eat, plan a route, book a hotel and sleep. One of the best things about our holidays is breaking that routine, fun as it has been.
We get up later, lingering over the Hotel de France’s extraordinary breakfast. We do not pack. We take our washing to a self service laundry. Read Le Monde Diplomatique in the park, have hair cut, read our books (plus catch up on the diary and picture editing).
We look at some contenders for Conveyance of the Day (note particularly the skeleton hand mirrors on the green bike) but remain unconvinced.
We find important evidence that Doris’s cyclist’s tan is the new fashionable thing to have.
And we simply wander around the town looking at the huge range of things you can buy. This is a picture of a traiteur’s shop. It is an interesting cultural shock, coming back into the lavishness of the Western Europe lifestyle after the period in Hungary and Bulgaria.
We decide not to go through the Naval Museum, doing that plaque reading and nodding thing. We decide not to go to their Rope Walk as the one at Chatham Dockyard was so good. We look from a distance at the Hermione, a 1997 recreation of the three masted frigate in that in 1780 took Lafayette to America. Given its age and size we are put in mind of Jack Aubrey’s HMS Surprise. We also look at one of our favourite items – an unexplained crane – and we muse on the tidal range of the dockyard’s access river and the rather odd decision to put the dockyard this far inland.
Sid and Doris had a lot of fun working out how Hermione’s dock gate works. The ship does sail and between voyages is in a wet dock behind what looks like lock gates. But then you see there are no hinges, it does not split. It is hollow, the water in the caisson is pumped out and then floated to one side to let the ship out. And, we guess, pushed back in place super-quick before the tide ebbs away.
Rochefort has Musee des Commerces d’Autrefois. This has shops and workshops as they were in the early 20th century: Doctor’s surgery, pharmacy, blacksmith, hat maker, grocery, bar. In some cases they have taken all the fittings from a ‘barn find’ business. They have also found a village school and today we arrived just in time for Mademoiselle to give dictation. Sid and Doris sat with the French visitors to take down the story of ‘Une petite Parisienne decouvre la compagne’ with a dip and scratch pen. We made fewer mistakes than some of the French tourists and were awarded a Bon.
A poster on the wall also helps explain why we are still pretty rubbish at going up hills.
Although the conveyance of the day may be the Hermione, an honourable mention goes to this early model Adventure Tricycle. Doubtless “S” has some technical recommendations.
Doris wanders off to get her hair cut and finds a #virtualsouvenir for Sid – a set of Airfix models for perfect re-enactment of Operation Market Garden by obsessive wargamers. Episodes of the Epic Tour continue to join up with each other most satisfactorily.
And she has Asperges for dinner or as the Germans would say, Spargel. Yes, again our tour joins up with the early days but the good news is that now the Spargel is green rather than white. (Mister Bat observes that it still… well, let’s not go into too much detail here.)
Tomorrow we head to La Chataigneraie in the Vendee, a solid 95 kilometres away with some climb. Best we miss out on happy hour.