Thursday 15 August - Rodemack

Where's Bertie? He's exactly where he was yesterday, at the Aire at Rodemack.
Weather: Foggy start, soon burning off to sunshine, coming in cloudy for a while in the afternoon, then sunny intervals. 27 degrees.

It was gone 8 by the time I prised myself out of bed this morning, but I didn't rue the late start once I looked out of the window and saw the fog. Whilst it would give cooler running conditions, the first part of my route was on roads, and thus it would be safer to have good visiblity*.

By the time I set out, the sun was winning over the fog, and out through some local villages I headed. It's amazing how French everywhere looks, even so close to the borders of Luxembourg & Germany - a fact that we commented on in the very first village we passed through when we entered France yesterday.

At the third village, having trodden tarmac/concrete all the way there, I finally turned off road and a series of pleasing woodland and field paths led me onwards.

Rural views. Nowt spectacular, but pleasant enough. 

Woodland paths

Reaching a main road, Bertie was only a couple of kilometres away from me, had I turned right, but I still had the second half of the route to do, so straight across I went.

The cloud factory wasn't making any great impact. 

The second half of the route didn't go so well. First there was the mudfest section through a forest...

It was that type of mud that's both slippery and adheres in great quantities to the bottom of the shoes.

...then, not long later, just as I was admiring the loveliness of the grassy track I was on, it became hideously tyre rutted, with the middle bit being rutted by animal hoofs, all of which had baked hard and then been covered by long grass so I couldn't see the detail of where I was treading. That was slow indeed (frustratingly, as it was downhill), and slow wasn't good as the entire fly population descended on me as my pace dropped.

I'm not sure, from my small screen, whether this snap does justice to how slow-going this track was.

These chapesses kept me company a while whilst I made slow progress

I returned to Bertie via this town gate. We'd walked through it yesterday but apparently I'd failed to notice it then. The archway was demolished in 1944 to allow US tanks into the village, then rebuilt in 1989.

All in all, it was a good outing, even if I was two and a half minutes late back (I'd told Mick I would be gone for 2 hours). In the meantime, Mick had gone out to visit the boulangerie resulting in sustenance for morning coffee (actually tea, and consumed at gone noon)...

I described this one as a Yorkshire Pudding Custard Cake. It was good.

...and a fine dessert this evening:

Baked cheese cake, perfectly chilled in the bottom of the fridge all day.

Mad fools and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, and whilst we didn't quite do that, it was a hot and sweaty affair when we headed out to finish our tour of the village at 2pm.

View across the rooftops from the upper wall

If abducted by aliens and plonked here, I don't think I'd struggle to know what country I was in.

I mentioned yesterday that the village was not what I expected of a French medieval village, moreover, one in the list of 'most beautiful villages of France'. It's not that it's in any way unattractive; quite the contrary, but I had the image of stone built Disney-esque medieval villages that we've visited before. Rodemack is surrounded by a wall, but inside there are very few stone buildings, with the vast majority looking similar in style to what you would expect to find in most French rural villages. It's certainly the sort of place you could pop by and do justice to in the space of an afternoon (even though we are quite happy to have made a day and a half out of it).

We will be moving on tomorrow, but in a change to the (un)advertised programme, we are taking a little detour...

(*in hindsight, I would have been fine on those roads in the fog as only one car passed me, but I wasn't to know it would be quite that quiet.)