nature

Obama and Me….

| Mairead

We’ve seen lots more beauty in the past two days since leaving Kilkee but we got a great surprise in a small town called Moneygall.

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(Beautiful place on Loop Head called Bridges of Ross)

Around noon I was hungry and we saw a cute little cafe in the town but it was closed so we travelled on for about a kilometre when we spotted a large service station that served Tim Hortons coffee.

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(Amazing view near the lighthouse at the tip of Loop Head)

The same coffee we had become addicted to in Canada! We stopped off and had some coffee. Then while we were there a lovely couple from America arrived.

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(Swallow feeding her chicks outside our bedroom at a farmhouse near Killaloe)

I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to get a picture with them…

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(Me and Obama)

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 Turns out it’s their holiday home in Ireland. Who knew? Mairead.

On the Road Again

| Mairead

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(Our first photo point was an old church and graveyard overlooking the river Boyne)

It’s been a long time but we finally dusted off the motorbike, charged the cameras and took to the road. As I write we’re just outside Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. About two hours from home. We’re taking it slowly this time. You might remember two years ago we went to Florence via Venice on the motorbike? I haven’t been on the bike since. Every time Denis would suggest a possible trip I’d remember that last journey and the heat (40 degrees C in full bike gear)  and the length of time spent sitting on my posterior (some days more than 8 (eight!) hours) and the motorways in Germany (lots of big scary trucks.)

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(Going over a little bridge we realised we were crossing the Royal Canal (at Coolnahay Harbour) so we stopped for tea and soda bread (baked by the daughter of the last lock-keeper))

But Denis is very persistent and eventually he came up with a formula I was willing to test… travel (on mainly country roads) for one hour, eat, travel for one more hour, eat and sleep. Also, temperatures would be less than 30 degrees… probably much less. This week we’re testing the formula. In order to make the test more interesting we’re following the Irish photo rally. This is a list compiled by Gerry Christie with twenty four GPS points around the island of Ireland. There are clues as to what you might find at a point but you have to go there to see. The idea is that you get to travel to places on your motorbike around the island that you might otherwise never find. They’re dotted around the country so you can spend your time meandering from one to the next for days. Have a look at the map on irishphotorally.com.

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(Bumble Bee at work)

Anyway, it was with a bit of trepidation that I got on the back of the bike this morning but I was soon rewarded with the forgotten truth – it’s an amazing form of transport. I had forgotten. The heat and daily distances of the last trip had erased my memory of it’s beauty. The beauty of the smells… just five minutes from home we smelled the most amazing wild garlic smell. We pass this point at least four times a week, every week never smelling the garlic, but on a motorbike…. The beauty of fresh air! I know it’s free but it’s gorgeous and it smells kinda green, yep it does.

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(There’s a lake right next to our hotel with a little jetty)

Anyway, we’re off to dinner now and tomorrow we’ll drive for an hour, eat, drive for another hour eat some more and sleep. We’ll also take some pictures and smell some more smells.

Bye for now, Mairead.

Sunday Walking

| Mairead

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(The one picture in Marley Park)

We are continuing our new tradition of a Sunday walk and today we went back to Marley Park. We didn’t bring the camera…. we’re a bit lazy and anyway we both had cameras in our phones. Funny though – they only work if you charge them! Both, yes both ran out of power as we were walking. So there’s only one photo.

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(Painting on paper)

We parked in the car park closest to the motorway, which means for the first ten minutes the noise is distracting but then you start to hear the stream and children playing and the ducks on the lake. It’s a lovely place. We had brought a picnic and some cold brew coffee but when we arrived at the picnic spot there was an organic fair. Inside a big tent there was a cookery demonstration and outside lots of stalls, including a very enthusiastic organic veg man. He had cut up some of his apples for tasting and they were amazing. Denis described them as being “like the ones we used to rob as kids!” I don’t like to mention this law-breaking side of his personality but it does evoke memories of a simpler time. I , of course, did not steal other people’s apples but I think I remember hearing about people who did…..

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(It’s red!)

There was a long queue for the coffee stall and if we’d had a few extra mugs we might have stood a chance of setting up our own stall. I can get quite enthusiastic myself about the cold brew. But we didn’t. When we got home I started on a job I’ve been putting off for about five months. Painting a wall. While I like putting paint on paper or maybe even on canvas, a wall is big. So, it took me until today to start. The other thing about a wall? You can’t finish it in one afternoon. It may take five months…

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(Too red?)

Take your camera when you go for a walk, Mairead!

The Green Venice

| Mairead

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(The embarcadère in Coulon)

When we picked this area in France for our September Retreat, I had noticed something on the map – the Marais Poitevin and in particular The Venise Vert  (the Green Venice.) You might remember how much I loved the real Venice, so I thought I might also love this French and green version.

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(Wrong way, paddle backwards…)

The pictures showed tunnels of trees (and you know I love tunnels of trees) over narrow canals with flat-bottomed boats. But it turned out to be a bit of an elusive spot, ok, not the whole area. To be precise I had a very particular picture of what it would look like (mainly the tunnels, sigh) but each time we drove to La Rochelle and through the Marais Poitevin area we would pass canals at the edge of the road with flat green farmland on the far side. Something wrong with that picture. No trees, no tunnels, not even one flat-bottomed boat.

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(Heading for my river bank… shriek, shriek, paddle, paddle…)

And so with only a week to go (I know, I know, 4 days isn’t a week) it was now or never! I set to work on Saturday evening attempting to pin down the exact location I had seen in the pictures (oh and disaster, I couldn’t find the pictures any more…) It was not an easy job, but I did locate a town possibly very close to but not exactly the right place. It would have to do. So on Sunday afternoon we put the name in the sat nav and set off to… Coulon.

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(Sigh…)

On the way we got a bit side-tracked when we found another of the places the French people go on a Sunday afternoon – car-boot sale or an empty-your-attic sale, there were no signs and I don’t know the difference. Suffice to say there was lots of very good bargains to be had. Can you guess what I got for €1 each? More tea towels. And they’re linen. And they have sweet little loops for hanging up. Did I mention that I love fabric? (Tea towels are fabric!) Especially in bundles. The very nice French lady who was selling the tea towels had ironed and folded each one and tied a little ribbon around a bundle of six. (Yes, I did buy six more tea towels. No, I’m not going to use them for drying dishes.)

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(Sign)

Now, even if we didn’t find Green Venice, all was well in my world. But we did! We arrived in Coulon and my investigations had indicated that we needed to find the area of embarcadère (I think it means where you get on the boats.) Long story short: we parked, we had lunch, we checked out the flat-bottomed boats.

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(Sigh…)

Finally, we found the perfect boat and got in holding a paddle each. First, it’s very funny. One person rows a bit and then the other person rows a bit and both people laugh a lot. But if one person is stronger or more competitive the boat soon starts heading towards the other person’s bank of the river. Huge shrieks of laughter from me and a smidgen of panic. Instructions from Denis. Paddles in the water again, huge smiles.

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(Sigh…)

Eventually, we started to match each other’s strength and competitive force and we stopped working so hard and the river took us along. And it was so cool and, really, really peaceful. And because each of us had our hands full and our feet firmly balanced it was almost impossible to think of doing anything else, except being there. We stopped wanting to take pictures. So we took very little. Instead, we had the experience, of floating, on the water, in the canals, built by 13th century monks. Sigh…

Sigh, Sigh, Sigh… Mairead.

The Tunnel I love

| Mairead

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(Leaves and seed. I pick something up every time I go walking)

I went on my walk this morning (of course I did!) a bit earlier than usual because it’s not so pleasant to walk in the heat. Anyway, there’s a stretch of the road which I call the tunnel (or tunnel as I like to say in French) and I absolutely love it. It’s dark and incredibly quiet in there. You can just about make out the light from the sky in the distance. This morning I had to stop and get a good feel of its magic.

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(Duck. From the riverside in Vouvant)

I never bring the camera out on my walk, much too much distraction, but two nights ago I had my phone and I took a picture. It might not be very clear but I wanted to give you a visual sense of my tunnel.

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(My tunnel, sigh)

So… I’m standing in my tunnel this morning and the phrase the darkest hour is just before the dawn comes to mind. And it got me thinking… my tunnel is such a comforting place to be, I wonder how it would work if the next time I’m feeling down, I imagine myself in my tunnel. A place to be held safely in the dark until it’s time to venture out into the sun. I’m definitely going to try it. (By the way, in case I forget and you notice I’m needing my tunnel, could you remind me please?)

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(Love this quote from Maya Angelou, it’s now in one of the journals I’ve been creating here)

With only a week left (I think I’ll keep saying that every day from now on….) I’ve been thinking of all the things I want to do before we leave and on the very top of the list is… getting a video of the hens running to me (their surrogate mother…) So far we have a startled looking hen standing very still so hopefully they’re not camera-shy. If we do manage to capture momentum I’ll find a way to share it with you.

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(Very cute sign in Vouvant)

From the sunny swing, Mairead.

Just Walk

| Mairead

You might remember my budding exercise regime? I was going to walk everyday. I was even thinking of walking on the wet days.Well, it’s been faltering a bit. Now, I had read somewhere that if you can repeat something for 21 consecutive days it will become a habit. That’s what I wanted to do with the walking. It was having a shaky start. Then yesterday it got a bit of a boost. I was reading twitter (it’s shorter than email or Facebook…) last night and someone had retweeted a comment from a lady who wished “that I could wake up in the morning on the Camino and just walk.”

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(Some more free food)

It was a simple enough sentence but something about it was captivating. This woman had been walking on the Camino (the Pilgrim’s Walk in Spain) earlier this year and her love for it came through in her very few words. It was a practical example to me of how one person’s passion transfers to another. It did to me.

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(No hunting here, seen on edge of forest I passed)

I read twitter to get recipes from The Happy Pear, to look at cartoon drawings, to hear the news (in very small chunks), to be inspired by Brene Brown or to be amused by Ellen. But last night I went to sleep dreaming of what it must feel like to want to walk, even walk all day long. It wasn’t something I had really felt before… the wanting bit.

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(Big sunflower face, lots of sunflowers on my walk)

So when I woke up this morning I was raring to go. I put on my new walking shoes and set out the door. Backtrack, first I had my breakfast and then I put on my shoes and went out the door. Although my mind was very excited and ready for a long walk, my body was less than enthusiastic. So I promised it (am I the only one who talks to her body?) that we would just take one step at a time and if things got tough we could always turn back. And then I began to think about the lady and her wish to “just walk” and it was different. Just walk is much easier than exercise regime. Just walk is simple and reminds me of something old-fashioned, an older time, maybe a time when the shops closed on Sundays and a half day on Wednesdays. And walking was entertaining, fun, social.

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(One little flower popped out after the rain)

It was so easy I took another Just walk after lunch, Mairead.

Rain or Shine, some more hen pictures

| Mairead

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(We went for a ramble around the lake at Mervant this morning)

It’s Sunday afternoon, I’ve just brought the hens their afternoon treat – porridge. They love it! Being from France they possibly haven’t tasted it  (you can only buy it here in the English section at the supermarket) but they get very excited when they realise that’s what I’ve brought. Their excitement is followed by very noisy pecking in the feeding dish. This weekend they’ve had a lot of excitement food-wise.

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(Some swallows gathering on the wire outside our house)

It rained heavily all day yesterday (Saturday) which was fine as I had planned a day of answering long unanswered emails, so I sat most of the day on the sofa in front of the windows to the garden. After a while I kinda forgot where I was. You miss a lot of reality when you’re on the computer. So it was lunchtime before I realised the hens were probably drenched, I went to investigate. I had let them out of the house earlier in the morning when the rain was only starting and was surprised that they seemed very eager to be outside.

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(Can you see the rain?)

Now when I reached their enclosure I couldn’t believe the state of them. They were indeed drenched, they looked like they’d been for a swim, feathers plastered against their heads, beaks to the ground. I remember the bird ‘flu crisis we had in Ireland a few years ago, so I knew birds could get the ‘flu, is this how it started?

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(The poor chicken… notice the muddy beak?)

I went straight back to the house (the one we’re in not the hens) and had Denis check if his brother Liam (he and Kate live with the hens I was hen-sitting last summer) was online to get advice. He wasn’t. So instead we searched for a hen forum (where hen owners gather on the internet to chat… really…)

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(Soaking)

We found one in America. There was lots of chat about hens in the rain but the main message –  they’re fine. They love the rain. Why? Because it provides the other thing they love – worms. It has been a very dry summer here in the Vendee and so the ground is very hard, making it difficult for worms to get to the surface or hens to get through to them. Not yesterday. Soft earth. Lots of worm potential. Happy hens.

So how do birds get the ‘flu? Mairead.

Free Food! Free Food! Free Food!

| Mairead

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(The sky last night and that’s a small plane up there)

I want to walk every day after breakfast while I’m here, just for twenty minutes, a budding exercise routine. So this morning I got up a bit earlier than usual (to let the girls out) and went out the back gate and down another lane. It’s a farm lane I’m guessing, because it’s not paved but perfect for walking. Unusual for my experience of France the lane is bounded by ditches and sometimes hedges of trees. They are old trees, like oak and horse-chestnut. Beyond these are crops still growing, like sunflower or wheat. There are also newly cut fields and there’s one ploughed field.

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(Droopy headed sunflowers as far as the eye can see)

On my way back I decided to pick up some cooking apples. Now, I’m talking literally “pick up” – from the ground. Before Mara left she showed me an apple tree in the next field, it didn’t seem to belong to anyone, she said, no one was picking up the windfalls. So we did and this morning I did. I felt very oddly excited by the fact that I would not have to exchange some coins for this bounty. And I wasn’t just taking them because they were lying around I have a plan.

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(Little blue butterfly)

Each day I’ve been making little treats for the hens with the bits and pieces of leftover food from our table. This always includes some bread because the bread seems to go stale very quickly. But hard stale bread seemed a poor gift so I was softening it with some warm milk. It gets lovely and mushy… and that’s when I remembered Bread and Butter Pudding. I used to love that as a child and I often have fond memories of it, I even asked my mother for the recipe once but never made it – there’s milk in it, I don’t like milk! Despite that I still like the idea of it and I love the memory of it, warm and comforting, mmmmm.

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(The apple shop)

So, I’m going to make a different version of Bread and Butter Pudding. I’m usually not good at making up recipes – I worry that it’ll be awful and after all the hard work I’ll have to throw it out. No problem here – the hens eat everything, even stuff that seems really yuck. And I’d be throwing out the bread anyway (to the hens!) and the apples were free and… and it might be a good time to let go of worrying about getting something wrong! So my version will have stale bread, cooking apples, rice milk and cinnamon. Oh and eggs, of course eggs, the other thing we can just “pick up” here. Oh and blackberries, yum.

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(Soon to be Bread and Apple Pudding)

There’s one small problem, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to start, we’ve eaten all the bread. Hang on, there’s another problem… I don’t know if it’s ethically sound to offer cooked eggs to hens?

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(Oh and free drying too)

From a cloudy with sunny spells back garden in France, Mairead.

Wake up and smell the eggs!

| Mairead

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(Two of the girls… saying something in French)

A wonderful thing happened! Our host went away this morning for a long weekend and left me in charge of the hens! Well, Denis too but I don’t intend to allow him any access. The recommendation must have come through from Kate because it’s quite a specialised job and my experience in the area will definitely have helped me get a foothold into hen-sitting in France.

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(Great profile)

So this morning when I heard Mara’s car pull away I rambled up the garden to the hens, just so they’d know there was someone responsible in charge. I had also prepared a bread and warm milk treat, so they’d know it was me and not Denis whom they could trust. The hen-house was open when I arrived but two of the three girls were still inside, and as soon as they saw me they came outside to see what I’d brought. While they were munching (or is it sucking?) I went to see if they had left anything for me. They had indeed left something but not eggs. Part of my role includes cleaning up their bedding area, that’s were they leave the eggs and also the droppings. There was plenty of droppings but no eggs, possibly Mara collected them before she left.

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(Front door)

By the way Mara explained something I’d rather not have known…. so if you’re squeamish about where your eggs come from, look away now. She says the eggs and the droppings exit the hen from the same slot…… I don’t believe her, I much prefer the egg magically appears story.

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(Back door)

Anyway, after the clean up job I went off for a walk and when I came back I set up my work area in the garden on the trestle table. I was hardly five minutes into my routine when I heard one of the hens squawking loudly. I hadn’t heard that before and thought maybe it was stuck in the fence, so I went up to investigate. She seemed fine but how would I know? The only contact person I have in the area is a handyman Mara introduced me to in case anything stopped working in our cottage. She said he’s very knowledgable. About hens? Could my short hen-sitting career in France be coming to an end?

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(Checking out some insects)

Just in case he didn’t know much about hens I chatted away confidently to the noisy one and the others gathered around also. Then I wandered around to see if there were any predators lurking. No, nothing. Then I went to look in the house and guess what I found? You’ll never guess – two eggs! Aren’t hens great?

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(The two eggs!)

So intelligent, Mairead.