How We Made It To The Med After a Month (and a day), and How Flamingos In Flight Flapped Fleetingly By!

Well …. They did!

We took a day off (from both house-hunting and house-keeping) and went to the sea-side! Harry didn’t come, just us and the little car, but Harry’s turn will come. We made our way through Montpellier’s horrendous traffic and headed for Sète. (Accent! Thanks David, and Carol!) First we came to the lagoon where there were indeed flamingos, some in flight. Through the town and out the other side and we had a picnic, outside, in sunshine, overlooking the Med!

On the other side of the road, the villas rose up the hillside – it was easy to choose and say ‘We’ll have that one!’

I think we both knew we wouldn’t!

We drove on down to the Cap D’Agde, which was nowhere near as scenic a drive as we’d been led to believe, then back towards that awful traffic which surrounds Montpellier. Apparently this is because the previous Mayor wouldn’t grant funding for a proper ring road. (The Mayor is a politically elected and very powerful local person in French communities.)

Actually, I’m losing track of days and dates! That day out was probably Thursday 18th. Or it may have been Friday … We went to the Med again on Sunday 21st, not quite such a fine day, but we had a nice picnic of garlic sausage and French bread – which doesn’t half make a crummy mess if eaten in the car!  – and we drove through La Grande Motte, famous for its outstanding blocks of flats all with different and unusual designs. We even managed to find a way ‘home’ which didn’t involve traffic jams, but then – it was Sunday.

Today (Monday22nd) we headed into the hills and visited the Gorges De L’Hérault. This was a spectacular drive in fairly good weather, and the highlight was the ‘Site of Devil’s Bridge’. We were a bit puzzled as to which bridge was which, until we went below the bridges to a widening of the river (very fast flowing) where we could see work going on to restore an older bridge – presumably THE ‘Devil’s Bridge’.

Footnote: Time to resolve the question of ‘bricks’.  Remember? The ones you are allowed to put in the recycling bin with your plastics. Well, in French, those containers in which many of us now buy orange juice and so on, and sometimes even cheap wine, because of their shape, are known as ‘briques’, which does mean ‘bricks’, but in this context the translation should be ‘tetra packs’: