It is a mark of this year’s weather that we have come to regard a day without rain, no matter how much cloud, as a good day. Such a day was today; ten tenths cloud until about about 5:00 PM but it didn’t rain, so we were winning.

The early morning was very promising with mist on the river and over the town – quite picturesque. The promise was broken, though. Rather than the mist burning off, as one might expect, the misty sun was shortly covered and white and grey cloud cover persisted all day. Damvix was attractive in the morning, though.

Since yesterday had been continuously wet, we chose bike routes that were largely on roads to avoid any muddy residue. One trouble with weather such as this is that the effects persist for days, spoiling otherwise enjoyable routes. We did 14 miles in the AM, had a casual lunch of ludicrously cheap pate (less than 40p for a slab that would last two days – we really know how to live!) and bread, followed by a 16 mile trip in the PM to ride off the doubtless excessively fatty calories. The euphoria of the new saddle is beginning to wear off – my backside is beginning to feel it.

Some sun broke through for more than five seconds at precisely 5:00 PM.  To mark the occasion,Carol heard and found some kingfishers circling around one of the smaller canals nearby.

The evening was clear and the sun shone. While we were enjoying a barbecued duck breast, we were honoured to be visited by an adult hoopoe and its fledged chick flapping to be fed. Naturally, when a camera was to hand, the hoopoe wasn’t, and vice-versa. Still, it was a thrill to see these somewhat comical birds at relatively close quarters.

(Aside: Duck breast, especially French duck breast which is about an inch thick, makes a better steak than most steaks. Strip the fat off and cook it just as you would a good steak.)

Tomorrow is supposed to be good but Sunday and the early part of next week are expected to be nasty. We need to get a newspaper and decide what to do and where to go next. Another decision time approacheth.

… with a slight modification …

Incey wincey spider climbed up the spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out,
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,
Incey wincey spider climbed the spout again.

Today, regrettably, we seemed to be missing out on the "out came the sun" bit. The rain was a little unscheduled too, really, since we hadn’t moved on yesterday. Pattern broken.

We didn’t need much shopping but we did need a working wi-fi so, rather than sit in the caravan with faces as long as a poplar tree, we drove back into Niort to visit the unadvertised McDonalds again. Neither was it "sundae de saison" weather so we opted for two espressos. While I was playing "big spender" and buying these, Carol found a suitable table and tried connecting to McWiFi. Wonderful! The previously McBroken McWiFi had been McSorted and was McWorking. Several quick clackety-clacks on the keyboard and our outstanding four blog posts were published and we’d tidied up our email inboxes.

For some reason we could also access Météo France unfettered and it looks as though, after today’s grizzly weather, we may have a couple of reasonable days. Sunday looks pants, though. In fact, it looks as though a nasty depression is heading for northern Europe for the beginning of next week. We’ll have to keep an eye on where we should be.

Since it’s a naff day and there isn’t much else to write about, let’s turn to food. It isn’t just making food out of unusual ingredients, specialities like anguilles (eel) and rigondin (coypu), that distinguishes individual areas of France, it is also the way an area treats or presents regular, day-to-day food items. Here in the Marais Poitevin, they have a loaf of bread called a maraichine which resembles a baguette but has strangely forked ends. ("White man bake with forked bread".) The flour is different, too – it has some small seeds in it, so it isn’t simply a presentation affectation.

Keeping the foodie theme going, for lunch, we tried cheering ourselves up with some grilled chicory (a.k.a. Belgian endive), goat cheese and jambon cru (raw ham). While we’re at it, let’s have a little grumble about rip-off Britain prices. Over here, six or seven good sized heads of chicory prepackaged in a bag: about €2.50. In England, two or three small heads of chicory in a bag: about £1.70 (if you can find it). Roughly the same price for less than half the goods.

The evening meal will be (yes, I’m writing this early), come hell or high water (probably the latter), a Weber-roasted joint of pepper-encrusted fillet of veal accompanied by céleri rémoulade (celeriac with a mustard mayonnaise) and taboulé. The veal will be roasted under the rain-shade if necessary, where we may well be glad of the heat thrown out by good ol’ portable Weber.

For the insatiably curious, the yellow creation backing the bread photograph is our outside, plasticized, washable table cloth depicting olives and sunflowers; very Provençale. The dark red creation under the grilled chicory is one of our two inside real material table cloths, both the same material, depicting olives and cicadas; also very Provençale. There are some very pleasing, sunny table cloth materials available over here.

(I had to write this early before the vino plonko rosé took effect.)

Myocastor coypus – the coypu. Britain’s largest rodent reaching up to a metre in length. It was imported from South America for the fur trade and, with the expected human incompetence, was allowed to escape. It established itself firmly in East Anglia, especially the Norfolk Broads, where it was regarded as a pest due to its habits of damaging river banks and over-grazing marsh plants. It has now been controlled.

It would appear that the French had similar designs on the coypu, which they call le rigondin. Since the Marais Poitevin is a marshy wetland with many drainage channels and canals, it is another attractive habitat for good ol’ myocastor coypus where it seems particularly numerous.

After a leg-loosening casual morning pedal followed by yet more leg-loosening over a vinous lunch, we leapt onto our bikes yet again to go and investigate Coulon, about ten miles away. Coulon is a slightly more touristy town and the excuse for our bike ride was a search for a Marais Poitevin sticker for Billy (he likes to have souvenirs of where he’s been). On the way into Coulon, we saw about half a dozen rigondins calmly grazing away in some drainage channels just a little way outside of Coulon.

Demonstrating a typically Gallic approach to pest-control, not only did Carol find Billy a suitable sticker in one of the gift shops, she also found them selling pots of a couple of unusual appetizing local delicacies: rillettes de rigondin (potted coypu) and pâté de rigondin (coypu pate). Let’s not waste them, let’s eat them.

We cycled back along a rigole, one of the larger canals, and saw many floating cages that were obviously traps for the unsuspecting rigondins. Fortunately, we didn’t see any containing captives. Maybe the critters aren’t quite so unsuspecting. We saw none anywhere near the traps, only in waterways where there were no traps.

No, we haven’t tasted any.

The sun returned accompanied by a few clouds that didn’t appear too threatening. Time to go shopping, refill the tank (still over half full following our short hop up to Damvix) with precious diesel, and to look for some wi-fi capability. Since Mike & Linda seem to shop at a "Super U" in Magné near Niort, which might just have a McDonalds, we decided to try there.

The Super U was on the way into Magné and we had arrived just in time for the lunchtime closure of la caisse so no chance of buying diesel for the next two hours. We wanted to get the shopping last so as to get  it back to refrigeration quickly, so we continued into Niort in search of wi-fi. Having driven almost all the way around Niort seeing no signs advertising McDonalds, we just happened to stumble across one. it was also within a hundred metres of an Esso Express, just about the one automated fuel station that does take UK money cards. Excellent, we filled up, went into McDonalds, bought an ice cream for you-know-who and two espressos, sat down and found the McWiFi to be McBroken – McBlast!

Another laptop man told Carol that it usually worked but wasn’t today. Then a cheery McDonalds McEmployee came and asked us if the wi-fi (apparently pronounced "wee-fee" in French) was working. "Non", we replied, and went off to do our shopping.

On the way into Super U, we bumped into a couple Carol had met at our first campsite in Huisseau-sur-Cosson. Small world! Signs were looking good for a rare barbecue and the Super U had some good looking sardines. We usually do barbecued sardines for lunch but, since time was marching on (2:30 PM), we thought we’d save them for the evening and munch cold sausages for lunch.

Back at Damvix, another English couple pitched up having been down in the Gers region, just above the Pyrenees. They related stories of storms and cold weather. They’d met people fleeing Spain, even, where it seems the weather has been similarly pathetic, except right down in the south. Considering our various conversations with people, we have done reasonably well, it seems.

We went for an 18-mile pedal to work up an appetite and to let the few clouds clear up for the evening. Finally, the travelling Weber got unpacked and fired up ready for a swift grilling of sardines. The technique with sardines is to cook them whole; head, guts, the lot. Then you pick them up with one hand holding the head while the other holds the tail, and move them from side to side teasing the flesh straight of the bones with your teeth. This side-to-side motion with the hands either side of the mouth is why the Portuguese refer to eating sardines as "playing the harmonica". How colourful!

The Marais Poitevin is an absolute haven for wildlife. On our first afternoon/evening here we saw, for our first time ever, a stoat and a pine marten. Being a combined marsh and woodland area though, probably the most striking feature here is the bird life. From our campsite we have seen or heard:

• chaffinches (of course);
• robins
• cuckoos;
• spotted flycatchers;
• black redstarts;
• black kites;
• blackcaps;
• green woodpeckers;
• nightingales
• golden orioles;

Today, however, we could see nothing; everything was taking shelter, just like us, and getting very fed up with the rain. It began just after we awoke, around 7:00 AM and continued without pause for 15 hours finally dripping its last at about 10:00 PM as we were going back to bed.

We did have a worthy highlight, though. Mike, Linda and their daughter, Imogen, came down from Arçais to visit us and have lunch. Actually, they really wanted to visit Billy and get a taste of what life in a caravan might be like. They are planning to move over to France full time and are thinking of running their house in Arçais as two gîtes. At times when both the main house and its converted dependence are let, they are thinking about a caravan to go travelling in themselves. Billy, of course, is a very comfortable, modern van and they seemed quite taken with him. Time will tell if it’s the right solution for them.

We had planned to barbecue some duck breasts and some duck merguez (spicy sausages) but, because of the pants weather, we changed the menu to a salade tiède (a warm salad) of confit de gesiers avec lardons (preserved gizzards with bacon) followed by some cheese and bread. This was all washed down with lashings of local vin rosé.

Not only did it rain all day but it was cold, as well; a T-shirt and a rugby shirt in France in mid-June!

(Carol has pointed out that on each occasion that we have moved on, the following day has been dreadful. Maybe we should stay put.)

Today we moved off to Damvix. This was a bit of a mental challenge. The journey was a mere 65 miles but it was 65 miles north and we don’t usually do north only halfway through a trip. Logic and emotion dictate south but, this year, logic has to be discarded. France continues to be very unsettled vis-a-vis the weather with the south and the east seemingly taking the brunt of the storms. Counterintuitively, the more settled weather has thus far been in the west and the north.

Casting tradition aside, we set out and headed north. Shortly after leaving we began passing dozens of stork nests built on the side arms of electricity pylons. Since French roads are largely straight and largely empty, especially on a Sunday, even the driver gets to snatch glances without much danger. To make sure we continued to concentrate, after we had entered the Marais Poitevin  area, a stoat shot across the road in front of us. Rarely a dull moment.

We made the short trip in a little under 2 hours and received a very warm welcome from the campsite owner who remembered us from previous visits. Such a greeting instantly makes one feel at home. We arrived to a marché fermier (farmers’ market) in full swing in Damvix so we pitched up and wandered off to investigate. The first thing we bumped into was a very chirpy man selling all manner of live poultry: chickens (both hens and cockerels) ducks, young geese, quail, guinea fowl – very French. Amongst others, there was a lady making cane work for chair seats, another lady with a bread oven, a young blacksmith and, of course, a man selling goat cheese so I just had to dip into the food budget.

The star turn, the one that really got my digestive juices flowing, however, was a couple of guys barbecuing anguilles (eels). This being a marsh area of apparently reclaimed land, now drained by an extensive network of drainage canals emptying into the La Sèvre Niortaise river, eels are plentiful and very much a local speciality. Unlike Carol, I love them. Cheap they weren’t but €8 just had to be sacrificed to buy an assiette des anguilles. They were excellent. As I walked around the market happily munching away, a few people greeted me with a cheery, "bon appetit". So polite, the French.

We returned to Billy for lunch outside where we were causing a pair of chaffinches to fret because we were too close to their nest in one of the trees on the edge of our pitch. We’ll try to ignore them and, hopefully, they will become accustomed to us.

In the later afternoon we cycled the short distance, about three miles, into Arçais to find Mike and Linda’s house. Now armed with a complete address, we realized that, on two previous trips when trying to find their house just on the off chance that they would be here, we had been looking on the wrong side of the road. That was because I knew they had a barque (local boat) and the canal was on one side only. It seems that all houses, however, have right of access the the water. Live and learn.

Much to Mike’s delight, over a drink or two, Carol found some as yet undiscovered lizard orchids growing in their garden. One had fallen to the lawn-mower but more care will now be lavished on the survivors.

There was quite a gathering for the evening with Linda’s family being in residence as well as some of the colourful and friendly locals joining in; eleven in all. Mike and Linda are pretty well fluent in French and some animated conversation flowed. Carol and I followed some of it though not, of course, all; the occasional translation was necessary. Damp and overgrown barbecues were dried out and eventually encouraged to burst into life and a great time was had by all.

Cycling back in the fading light, a dark shape began running along the roadside before us. I accelerated and closed in on it just before it crossed the road and disappeared into the undergrowth. It was a pine marten. Not a bad wildlife way to end a good day.

Today is our last day at La Palmyre. The wind was more from the west so there a few more clouds but, consequently, it was a little warmer.

We popped in to La Palmyre for one or two final essentials in preparation for tomorrow’s journey to Damvix in the Marais Poitevin; wine, chiefly, since we are being entertained by Mike and Linda on Sunday. We got a bottle of pineau de Charente to take them. Pineau is a regional speciality, a blend of wine and cognac supposedly both made from the same property/grapes. It comes in white, pink and red varieties and, being slightly sweet, makes a good aperitif but also goes well with cheese (in my opinion, though the French would doubtless disagree).

The car park used as the market square in La Palmyre was bustling again with a vide grenier (empty loft) in progress. This is the French equivalent of a car boot sale/yard sale/garage sale. This is most definitely not my kind of diversion but we snapped it for a bit of local colour.

As we were indulging in lunch back at the campsite, our English friends returned and announced that they had had no trouble finding fuel to fill their almost empty tank. Let’s hope that continues to be the case. Although we feel very self-righteous with all our cycling in preference to driving, it also cannot help but make us feel a little restricted. We just are not certain what is happening or will happen. Never mind, just enjoy the sun while it is here.

We cycled out to phare de la Coubre (a lighthouse) in the afternoon only to discover, to Carol’s great disappointment, that we couldn’t climb up inside it. We had been able to do so when we were here six or seven years ago. It was a good excuse for another pleasant cycle ride through the coastal forest, though. The route back took us into a Club Med area full of the beautiful beginners learning how to wind surf, control kites for kite surfing and occasionally whizzing about on Hobie Cats. No one seemed to kill anyone else but they may have come close once or twice.

We’re supping a beer in our cybercafe doing our last postings before entering what may be a wi-fi black spot in the Marais; we’ve no idea. Let’s hope they’ve got diesel and have heard of McDonalds.

Today started cloudy with some brightness drifting through. After a lazy start to the morning, we loaded the laptop into a rucksack and cycled into La Palmyre to investigate a cybercafe we’d seen. A couple of pressions (draught beers) and a wonderful connection soon had our outstanding three blog posts published. There was even some French version of MTV entertaining us with a Coldplay track, amongst others. We were glad to see that we weren’t the only nerds in town; in a booth to one side was an English couple complete with webcam and ear buds carrying on a Skype conversation. They were supping a half carafe of local hooch and finally had lunch. Good for them – a most enjoyable way to avoid international phone charges.

In preparation for our weekend and travelling up to Damvix, we called in to a local boucherie to pick up two days worth of meat to go with our fridge full of veggies, then poodled back for lunch – the last of our rotisseried chicken. Maybe now we can have something different. 🙂

Anxious for some more exercise, we cycled south down the coast to St Palais-sur-Mer. By now the wind had shifted around to a more northerly direction and the skies were basically clear with some clouds drifting through. The cycle track through the coastal woodland got a little "interesting": there was one section of the piste cyclable (cycle track) described as "difficile" (difficult). It went up and down through some dune areas and there were some short, sharp shocks of climbs; not too severe, though. We’d never seen road signs beside a beach warning people of sable! (sand!) before, either. No shit, Sherlock!

St Palais-sur-mer was a typical French small seaside town, as far as I could see. There were a couple of architectural curiosities, though, including some interesting fishing constructions just on the way in to town.

On the slog back to La Palmyre, largely into wind, we realised that the excruciatingly expensive local fuel station was completely dry – pas d’essence, pas de gazole. This place was selling diesel at €1.60, a whopping 22 cents per litre more than we had paid, almost a euro per gallon. If that’s sold out we may be stuck here some time. We have a tankful that will get us to Damvix to meet Mike and Linda but we may not be going much further. Another English couple is off out looking for fuel tomorrow so we’ll see how they get on.

We sat outside to have dinner under the clear skies brought by the northerly wind but boy was it cool. I cannot ever before remember wearing a long sleeved shirt and long trousers in France in the summer. Another first!

Finally, a local disco playing incessantly tedious, monotonous rhythmic tosh that some call music started up and we put on our own Coldplay CD to try to drown it out. Hopefully it won’t go on all night. I’d rather listen to the baby long-eared owls.

We awoke to beautiful blue, almost cloudless sky with little wind. We’d been planning to be in Damvix in the Marais Poitevin to meet up with Mike and Linda Eaton on Sunday. Since we have such a wonderful pitch on a largely empty campsite (the nearest other campers must be 50 metres away) and the weather was looking reasonably stable, we had decided to maximize our time here and stay until Sunday morning. The wonderful local oysters were also demanding a repeat visit and today looked like a perfect day for it.

Having been here for almost three weeks now, my remaining few hairs were in need of a trim so Carol set about my head with my travelling rechargeable beard trimmer. One simply must look presentable for oysters. As we were making preparations for another bike ride to La Tremblade, Carol announced that we had had a visitor crawling over our sandals just outside the caravan door. A small lizard, clearly not as skittish as some, had waited long enough for Carol to change lenses and snap it. Maybe the Teva material looked uncomfortably familiar to it?

Carol had picked a somewhat circuitous route to La Tremblade in an effort to avoid the more direct but relatively busy road outside the campsite and, eventually finished with hair cuts and lizards, off we set. The "somewhat circuitous" route turned into a very circuitous route as we struggled to find the appropriate cross-country lane amongst many lanes, none of which were signposted. I tried asking a local which was the road to Dirée but my question was met merely with a quizzical look. That could, of course, have been the fault of my French. Eventually we seemed to arrive at a hamlet that we assumed to be Dirée but it was something of a leap of faith since, like all the lanes, it didn’t have a name posted either.

We were on familiar territory now, though, and were soon at La Tremblade in our favoured oyster shack putting together our own, do-it-yourself, plateau de fruits de mer: 8 huitres (oysters, #2 fines), 8 palourdes (clams), assiette de langoustines (langoustine/Dublin bay prawns/scampi – how many names does one crustacean need?), bouquet de crevettes rose (prawns), assiette de bulots (whelks, cooked). Accompanying this feast with another bottle of the delightfully tangy blanc marine, we were set for a splendid lunch.

This area seems to be hollyhock city; they are all over the place. By way of example, a little way along the quay at La Tremblade was what estate agents might describe as "a bijou property full of character" acting as a backdrop to a small but colourful collection.

The weather began to look "a little less settled" as we finally left the quay but, seafood not being calorie-free, we decided to cycle back the long way via the forest cycle tracks to work off some of them before launching into more courtesy of our remaining rotisseried chicken for the evening meal.

Wednesday is one of two market days in La Palmyre. We’d been in to the Sunday market which was absolutely heaving with humanity. Now, after 2.5 weeks in France and without yet having had a spinning (rotisseried) chicken, we fancied trying the market again, hopefully being quieter on a Wednesday, to remedy the situation and buy un poulet rôti.

I think it’s the unseasonably poor weather that we had during the first two weeks that has been responsible for our missing out on many of the things that define, for us, being in France. Let’s hope the remaining time is good enough for us to rectify things.

After Carol’s breakfast run to the local supplier of splendid croissants, we cycled in to La Palmyre and hit the market. As we had hoped, life was much more civilized – very much calmer. We were able to purchase some good looking green beans, an enormous spinning chicken that would do us for two lunches and a dinner (at least), and some picholines, a typically French green olive. Olives were another thing we had yet to sample on this trip. Unless one is sitting outside in the sun supping a pastis, they somehow don’t seem relevant.

Sauntering back with our purchases, we spotted an Internet cafe proclaiming free Wi-Fi, so perhaps we wouldn’t need to use any of our precious diesel on a second McWiFi run to Marennes.

Next door to the cafe was a shop selling delightful clothes of blanc de Nil (beautiful white Egyptian cotton). Carol was inside sifting through their wares and I sat outside waiting. The next corner shop was a boucherie/charcuterie selling, in addition to the meats, portions of cooked meals such as paella. In this case, the large paella pan was at the very edge of the counter open to the elements. As I watched, a cheeky little sparrow hopped onto the the edge of the paella pan and helped itself to a beak-full of rice before whizzing off back to its nest, presumably to feed its hungry clutch of chicks. Brilliant! (Brilliant provided that you don’t buy that paella, I suppose.)

I did have to use a little precious diesel taking my punctured tyre to be repaired five miles away. Since I had to leave it there being done, I had to use a little more to return and collect it. Having shelled out the not inconsiderable sum of €29 for a puncture repair, I gave the car a severe ticking off about causing us too much unplanned expenditure. That’s the cost of a decent oyster lunch with wine, for Lord’s sake!

In the late afternoon we cycled through the forest to the coast and into La Palmyre again, lugging the camera along in the hope of seeing some more kite surfing. Alas, the tide was a very long way out so no kites were surfing.

The day was brilliant and the skies in the evening were completely clear and blue. We’d planned to indulge ourselves with what I like to call "sun on a plate", one of the world’s great salads, a salade Niçoise. It was about time we were able to sit outside and enjoy such sunny treats. (Please excuse the olives being green instead of black.)

It was most enjoyable and none of it got pinched by an epicurean sparrow.