Emma captured another fox on the trail cam last night and a walk around with the bins this morning resulted in two new trip species of birds: tree pipit and black woodpecker. Fair to say the camp was another good one.
After quitting, we headed north, which meant getting past Bordeaux on the main dual / three-carriageway autoroute. Every time we've tried to do this (over many years) the result has always been very similar. It invariably involves slow / standing traffic and some exposure to examples of impatient / idiotic driving. Today was more of the same: it's just tedious. The only fun game to play is which juggernaut is furthest from home. A Lithuanian one won but we gave a consolation prize to the Danish entry.
Anyway, after eventually clearing the multi-national logjam we opted to come down a bit by heading to a super place we know in order to be able to fit in a run before lunch.
This worked out well and we enjoyed a sun-dappled effort along unpeopled forest tracks surrounded by birdsong, skittling lizards and spring butterflies.
Post lunch - and at the peril of putting ourselves way behind schedule - we continued the trog towards Cherbourg using narrow, quiet and bumble-supporting backroads.
This proved very enjoyable and we passed through many quintessential French landscapes accommodating archetypally spotless, well-manicured sleepy villages. We were also extremely successful in putting ourselves way behind schedule.
Come stopover time we struggled a bit, finding ourselves in an area that supported lots of vineyards and no obviously 'spare' bits of land. We circled a while before accepting it just wasn't to be and so moved on about 20 kilometres further north to a different - if still agricultural - landscape, this time dominated by several pods of enormous wind turbines rather than grape vines.
Arable and wind turbines aren't normally on our must-see list but we found the area helpfully criss-crossed with many useful tracks (designated as rural roads), and so tonight we tilt as we pay homage to Don Quixote. For completeness, the tilting comprises completely of Emma moaning about how loud these things are. In fairness, she has a point.
Actually, the spot isn't too bad at all. We have some woodland as well as open arable to look out over and have seen a decent mix of woodland and farmland birds, as well as brown hare and roe deer. Most notable birds have been hen harrier and cirl bunting.
This post was composed at 22:20 on Monday 7th April from our intended overnighting spot N 46.00355°, W 00.49798° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:46.00355%2C-00.49798