Holiday bits
A few random pics from the holiday...
Chateau and D-Day
Rather than ruin all that relaxation by dashing back through France in one go, we tend to take our time and have a couple of overnight stops on the way home, which also enables us to do a bit of sightseeing.
On the Sunday morning, we went to the château at Chenonceau, just east of Tours - actually on the Cher river rather than the Loire, which is where you tend to think the famous châteaux are.
As well as being the one with the arches over the river, it has two excellent formal gardens. And on top of that, it also has a magnificent vegetable, herb and flower garden, which it would be easy to miss - and which you really shouldn't!
On the Monday, we were further north and visited Arromanches, Gold Beach on D-Day and where the Mulberry Harbour was - and where bits of it still are.
We were lucky that the tide was out, so we were able to walk around some...
Waterlilies
While at the gite in France, we took just one day trip (we basically spent two weeks sat in the shade of a large oak tree, reading) - this was to the "Jardin des Nenuphars", Latour-Marliac, at Le Temple sur Lot, a few minutes from Villeneuve-sur-Lot. This is where hardy waterliliy hybrids were first grown and from where Monet bought the lilies for his garden at Giverny. They house the French national collection.
A lovely place, really interesting (and with a good cafe), although the greenhouse containing the exotic/large lilies was unbelievably hot and humid - it took me a fair while to recover from just a few minutes in there!...
Holiday Skies
Back from a lovely summer holiday in SW France, I've got a few photos to share.
First up we have a collection around the theme of "sky" - sunsets, stars and a thunderstorm.
Our gite was in the middle of nowhere and was quite high up, so we had a fantastic view of the sky at night - almost a horizon-to-horizon view of the milky way. I want/need a fast aperture wide angle lens as my 50mm f1.4 is nowhere near wide enough to do the sky justice, and my f2.8 24-70 lens isn't really fast enough.
Then we have some night-time photos I took at the gite, with the aid of a torch and SWMBO.
The third part is sunsets - not so much in the early days because there simply weren't any clouds (!), but some quite good ones later on.
We had one thunderstorm - I was woken by lightning just before dawn one day and thundered out to get some photos. All a...
France 2012
Here are a few photos from this year's summer holiday in France.
A fairly standard trip - a couple of days to drive down (staying at the lovely Auberge de la Hulotte in St Jacques d'Ambur, within sight of the Puy de Dome deep in the Auvergne), two weeks in a gite (booked via Halcyon Leisure) and then 4 nights on the way back (1 at the Hotel Le Pont Bernet in Le Pian Medoc, 2 at Hotel des Pins in l'Amelie near Soulac, and 1 at Hostellerie du Bois Guibert in Bonneval near Chartres). All of the establishments are recommended for both food and accommodation - as is the Logis de France chain.
Anyway, on to the photos.
A few from around the gite.
Some landscapes and bits and pieces. I'm particularly pleased with the hay bales - I've been looking for a particularly photogenic set of these for ages and happened to come across these while looking for some caves (which happened...