Morning all. A quick entry about a nice, surprise visit we had recently from a school-friend of mine, Alan, and his girlfriend, Ailish. Alan is French, originally from Brittany, but moved to the UK when he was about 15 and went to my school. He currently lives in Barcelona, and speaks fluent English, French, Spanish and (I think) also Italian. He and Ailish both hold Masters’ degrees in translation, and her language skills are as impressive as Alan’s.
Anyway, I hadn’t seen them for over a year and out of the blue, got a Facebook message from Alan asking if we were free on the 10th. As it turns out, Ailish’s family own a property in Riberac, just 40km from us, and they tend to come out every year to visit. When they realised how close Matt and I were, they arranged to cycle over to us to say hi. I replied to say that that would be lovely, but suggested that we come and pick them up in the car, as 40km sounded like a bit of a long, hard-core bike ride to me. How naive am I…
As well as visiting Ailish’s parents, part of the reason they are currently in France is that Alan’s brother is getting married on 21 August, and they have decided to head all the way up to Normandy to attend the ceremony – via bike. Nutters… In fairness, Ailish is only half nuts, as she at least had the sense to catch the train up to Bordeaux from Spain. Alan, on the other hand (who as our school-day peers will confirm) has always been extremely nuts, and rode on his bike all the way from Barcelona, crossing right over the Pyrennes mountains. It is about 470 km from Barcelona to where we are, and a further 600 or so km to Normandy. Again, all I can say is “nutters”.
Anyway, they were planning to swing by at lunch time and say hello before returning to Riberac in the evening, but just before setting off, they had an issue with Ailish’s bike, which took quite a while to fix. In the end, they set off around 3:30pm, and reached ours at around 6.30pm. Matt and I spent a far more sedate afternoon than theirs, lounging by the swimming pool enjoying a bottle of beer and trying to get to grips with their incredibly ambitious adventure.
We had a great evening catching up, eating and drinking out by the pool, but didn’t go too crazy as the cyclists had an early start planned. Mercifully for them, it is due to be fairly cloudy over the next few days, so the going should be a little easier. Alan, being Alan, wasn’t content with the mere 600 km ahead of him, so got up at 8:00 am and made the 10km round trip to the local bakery to pick us up some bread and pains au chocolat for brekkie. They left us around 11 in the morning, planning to get north of Angouleme by lunch time. It rained later in the day, so I hope they managed to find themselves some shelter…
In other visit news, our friend Jim from London has just booked a long weekend to come out and see us, which will be nice. He arrives this Saturday and stays with us until the following Wednesday, the day before Veronique and family arrive to see us. Well, it’s really more to see the cats, I think, but we are looking forward to it; they are lovely people. Ok, that is all from me now. Ta ta.