Where's Bertie? He's in the car park of the Mairie in Gonzeville (exact location: 49.76590, 0.80723).
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine but cold.
I was woken by the wooshing of a flame igniting on a gas burner at ten past four this morning. "Why is the fridge making that much noise?" was my first thought before I woke up sufficiently to realise that it was the heating kicking in, as the temperature inside Bertie fell below 7 degrees.
It was many hours later when I spotted that the largest skylight was slightly open. Neither of us opened it yesterday, so it must have been that way since at least Friday and explains why the temperature dropped so much faster than normal when the sun left us last night.
Bertie was already in the sunshine as we wandered down to the Boulangerie before we left town, but cars parked in the shade had a thick layer of frost - an acceptable price to pay for such glorious blue skies.
With bread and croissants stowed*, we left town and made another of our ridiculously short journeys. Today we have travelled 6.2km north, ending up in a very quiet place called Gonzeville. I hesitate to call it even a hamlet, as detailed explorations have led us to conclude that it is a scattered community of houses. It does, however, have a Mairie (Mayor's office) and they have kindly dedicated part of their small car park to motorhomes.
If it wasn't for that informal 'Aire de Camping Cars' poster on the gatepost, I would not have believed that it was acceptable to park, never mind stay, here. The Mairie is behind us, in front of us is an historic timbered barn.
This is definitely not a 'come and spend money here' sort of a place, but a 'come and see our history' one. There is nothing to spend money on, but there is a 4km heritage trail with eleven information points, all of which are bi-lingual (French and English). Three other Seine-Maritime circular walking routes also pass by, should one want a longer outing.
More wonderful olde worlde buildings, all set in undulating farmland stretching out as far as the eye can see.
During this afternoon's walk we commented that, outside of the towns, almost all of the houses in this region seem to have some history behind them - whether brick, flint, timbered, thatched or combinations thereof, they all look at least a century old. Having agreed on this point, I said "Of course, having said that we'll go round the corner and there will be a modern box."...
...and, to our amusement, so there was.
In between this morning's and this afternoon's walks came lunch (as you would expect), an inspection of Bertie's main door, and a digging out of the tool kit.
I noticed at the beginning of this trip that, although the main door was pushing back into its 'stay open' clip easily enough, when pulled back out of the clip, the door would drop down a little. That didn't used to happen. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed that we could see daylight through the seal at the top of the door, which further confirmed the fact that the door had dropped. My initial half-hearted look at the hinges didn't reveal how that was possible, and it wasn't until this lunchtime that I looked properly and found the vertical adjustment. It turned out to be an easy two-minute job, and also suggested that we need to check the tightness of the screws every now and then.
(*In the case of the bread, 'stowed' = sitting on the double seat in the 'living room', because we don't have a food cupboard big enough for a long baguette and at least there, anchored by a cushion, it's not going to become a missile during transit.)
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine but cold.
I was woken by the wooshing of a flame igniting on a gas burner at ten past four this morning. "Why is the fridge making that much noise?" was my first thought before I woke up sufficiently to realise that it was the heating kicking in, as the temperature inside Bertie fell below 7 degrees.
It was many hours later when I spotted that the largest skylight was slightly open. Neither of us opened it yesterday, so it must have been that way since at least Friday and explains why the temperature dropped so much faster than normal when the sun left us last night.
Bertie was already in the sunshine as we wandered down to the Boulangerie before we left town, but cars parked in the shade had a thick layer of frost - an acceptable price to pay for such glorious blue skies.
With bread and croissants stowed*, we left town and made another of our ridiculously short journeys. Today we have travelled 6.2km north, ending up in a very quiet place called Gonzeville. I hesitate to call it even a hamlet, as detailed explorations have led us to conclude that it is a scattered community of houses. It does, however, have a Mairie (Mayor's office) and they have kindly dedicated part of their small car park to motorhomes.
If it wasn't for that informal 'Aire de Camping Cars' poster on the gatepost, I would not have believed that it was acceptable to park, never mind stay, here. The Mairie is behind us, in front of us is an historic timbered barn.
This is definitely not a 'come and spend money here' sort of a place, but a 'come and see our history' one. There is nothing to spend money on, but there is a 4km heritage trail with eleven information points, all of which are bi-lingual (French and English). Three other Seine-Maritime circular walking routes also pass by, should one want a longer outing.
More wonderful olde worlde buildings, all set in undulating farmland stretching out as far as the eye can see.
During this afternoon's walk we commented that, outside of the towns, almost all of the houses in this region seem to have some history behind them - whether brick, flint, timbered, thatched or combinations thereof, they all look at least a century old. Having agreed on this point, I said "Of course, having said that we'll go round the corner and there will be a modern box."...
...and, to our amusement, so there was.
In between this morning's and this afternoon's walks came lunch (as you would expect), an inspection of Bertie's main door, and a digging out of the tool kit.
I noticed at the beginning of this trip that, although the main door was pushing back into its 'stay open' clip easily enough, when pulled back out of the clip, the door would drop down a little. That didn't used to happen. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed that we could see daylight through the seal at the top of the door, which further confirmed the fact that the door had dropped. My initial half-hearted look at the hinges didn't reveal how that was possible, and it wasn't until this lunchtime that I looked properly and found the vertical adjustment. It turned out to be an easy two-minute job, and also suggested that we need to check the tightness of the screws every now and then.
(*In the case of the bread, 'stowed' = sitting on the double seat in the 'living room', because we don't have a food cupboard big enough for a long baguette and at least there, anchored by a cushion, it's not going to become a missile during transit.)
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