A day in Sarlat with friends from the US

Our friends Pete and Jan are visiting with us for a few days. We'll play tourist here until Saturday and then we'll head to Paris for a long weekend. Yesterday we went to the town of Sarlat, an old medieval town restored in the 60s, the first in a series of restorations initiated by then minister of culture André Malraux back in the 60s. Sarlat is like a storybook town come to life - old winding streets, buildings of honey-colored stone, now with restaurants, fancy shops, everything a tourist could want, but also everything an artist could want. Here's an example of the varied architecture you'll see in this very special town:

Here's Jan and Pete

When we left Sarlat, we went home by way of the town of Tremolat, a very small town with - surprise surprise - lovely houses. Could anything be prettier than this cottage?

I love going to the supermarket

Our trip to the nearest supermarket covers 5.3 kilometers of back roads through farmland. It's a trip that's just a little bit different every day. Yesterday's entry showed the sunflower fields. Today there's a new sculpture that has appeared in a hayfield. I love it - the tractor makes the hay and then the hay makes a tractor. As I stopped to take a photo of this, an old farmer came walking down his driveway, offered his hand and said he saw by our number plate that we weren't from here and wondered if we needed directions. I told him No, we had just moved to here but hadn't yet changed our car registration. We chatted for a while and it turns out he knew the people who used to own our house. It's a very small world here. And a friendly one.

Sunflowers!

July is sunflower season and we're in the midst of both the month and the fields of flowers. Here's a photo taken on our way back from the supermarket today. This scene will soon be in a painting, I think. There's a small area at the side of the road where I can park the car and a few meters farther along is a spot with this view. What could be better? The sunflowers are not as spectacular as they could be this year though; they really need rain. We had a very rainy, cold unpleasant spring but once summer started, exactly to the day, the weather turned sunny and hot. There has been no appreciable rain since June 21, unless we count a 5 minute shower a couple of weeks ago.

OK, back home. I thought I'd give you a tour of our garden. Here, both in English and in French, the word 'garden' means what we call a yard in America. As you'll see most of this garden isn't what we'd think of as a garden, since it's mostly lawn and trees.

Here's the steps going down into the garden. There's an arbor arching over the steps and it's covered with trumpet vine, a very popular ornamental plant here in France. John trimmed this vine this morning, making it easier to walk under the arbor. Before he trimmed it, even I had to duck down to walk under it.

This is the view from the bottom of the steps, the pigeonnier with another huge old trumpet vine arching over its facade. A lovely thing, but in need of much discipline! It's too late to give it a good pruning now, but it will get a severe chopping back in time. Right now, the trumpet vines are taking over the yard, completely covering one of the apple trees, for instance. Once the leaves fall, we'll have to have someone in to hack it back.

To one side of the pigeonnier, we've installed a clothesline, here in use. It's been easy washing clothes these past few weeks with all the sunny weather. The area to the left holds our picnic table and chairs. Beyond the clothesline is our orchard, with apple trees, plum trees and cherry trees. There are also two peach trees, one just to the right of the clothesline, and another in front of the house, both of which we were assured were almond trees. But the fact that the land under them is littered with old peach pits leads me to think they are indeed peach trees.

Beyond the orchard is what was, and will be again next year, a vegetable garden. By the time we had the garden cleared this year it was too late to plant much of anything. Yes, I could plant some things now, but first I'd need to have the space roto tilled, since it was weeds for the past 5 years. In this clay soil, now turned to marble with the drought, breaking ground with a spading fork is just not an option. Anyway, here's the garden, with a line of roses defining one side. At the rear of the garden are large trees and bushes, with the stream beyond. When Cedric was interested in clearing the yard - an interest that faded rather quickly - he was also interested in finding little steps that lead to the small stream, La Bournegue, that forms the rear border of our property. Here's one set of stone steps he dug out. He says there's at least one more set of steps along the stream and possibly more.

the other side of the vegetable garden is a hedge of Rose of Sharon bushes.

Beyond this hedge is what I call the forest. This is a deliciously cool spot on a hot day. In the distance you can see the small greenhouse and the garage. To the right of the trees in this photo, there's a lovely stone-edged raised bed, empty now, that will be fun to play with in the future.

There's two large walnut trees in the forest, this one giving the largest walnuts I've ever seen, to judge from the shells littering the ground under it - and hidden in the cellar by various wild creatures living there for the past few years.

And here's the driveway, with it's border of the high laurel hedge and large and heavy wooden gate opening onto the street.

From the street, you can see the remaining part of out domain, a small field en friche as they say in French, meaning gone wild, not used or tended to. Maybe in time it will be part of a horse paddock.

But next to it is a very much larger field with - sunflowers!

And so ends our tour of our little piece of French countryside. Hope you enjoyed seeing it.

Did we get lost?

Note the town name on that sign! I think we have indeed been on another planet for the past two or three weeks. Perhaps we took a wrong turn somewhere? This is a sign we came across when taking a back road to the art show venue one day when it was my turn to be on duty.

The show itself was held over for an extra week and we had good crowds throughout the whole time, even though the posters all over the place showed the earlier end date. All in all, this is a very good venue for a show!

What's really been taking up our time, though, has been our septic system. Shortly before a quick trip back to the Ste. Colombe house to pick up some more things left behind, we found ourselves with a non-working toilet. Good thing we were leaving for the weekend! We called a septic-tank emptying company and they agreed to show up on the Monday and empty it. Which they did. But this did not solve the problem. The guys then made a hole (this is the most euphemistic way I can describe what they did) in the pipe going from the bathroom to the tank and used a RotoRooter sort of thing, which improved the situation but did not completely cure it, and left a very picturesque pipe, wrapped in plastic bags. The next day, our usual plumber came by and replaced this piece of pipe with another one without holes. All was well for about 3 days, and then everything backed up again. In the night, I thought to myself, Hey, it's just a piece of pipe that is causing the problem, one piece of pipe. Why can't that bit of pipe, only about 10 feet long, just be replaced?

So next morning, I called our plumber. Sure, said he, of course it could be replaced. But not by him. He only did things inside the house. We then called the people who will ultimately be doing the new septic system. Too busy, couldn't get to such a thing for weeks. Meanwhile, John had a look online and found a 24/7 emergency plumber. (There's a lot of benefits to living somewhere with a large English population; they're used to these sorts of services) They came by the next day, had a look at things and after much pondering about how to get a backhoe through the very narrow quarters leading to the septic tank, the digger operator came up with an easy solution: run the pipe above ground, no digging required. Well of course! It's to be temporary anyway, so why not just take this easy fix. We agreed, and the probably illegal job was done the following day. It's been working now for a week! We're back in the civilized world!!!!

Meanwhile, we've been unpacking boxes, moving furniture, moving furniture again, and again and again. We've also made trips to Ikea, built kitchen cabinets, put them in place, gone shopping for one thing after another. But we do take breaks now and then. We had to do some banking in the town of Lalinde and took in the weekly market as well. Here's a paella stand

and another that sells every sort of handbag you could want.

We also recently treated ourselves to lunch in the bastide town of Monpazier. When caught up in the turmoil of trying to get this house in order, it's easy to forget what an incredibly beautiful part of the world we live in. Here's some photos of a couple of the back streets we walked down in Monpazier.

Monpazier has handbag sellers as well.