Last night's impromptu stopover at the port of St Malo was actually pretty good and we weren't woken up until just after 6.00am when a ferry docked and all the associated fuss started. Staying anywhere in or around St Malo is a bit of a challenge, so the 6.00am result was agreed to be right enough
And so, to travelling together. We had a steady morning heading roughly west and caught up on tales as we went. We didn't even bicker (very) much.
By early afternoon we'd arrived at yet another absolutely superb greenway and felt duty bound to have a run / bike down it. Emma ran, I biked. The place we parked up at was a formal picnic spot on the site of a disused station house; and very pleasant it was, too.
As we returned from our respective training efforts we started to prepare to leave this agreeable if busy place casually noting it was being enjoyed by around a dozen natives eating, drinking, and chatting quietly in the warm afternoon sunshine. Until ... enter the man.
An obvious soap-dodger in his forties tipped up in a ubiquitous tatty French van: so far so normal. He then ostentatiously unleashed from his van four or five extravagantly ethnic percussion instruments, before starting to self-indulgently play them very badly indeed whilst shuffling awkwardly around the vicinity of his van; he was also occasionally chanting.
He appeared to wish to appear to be in some sort of transcendental state but simultaneously kept taking surreptitious peeks at the people who had been enjoying the erstwhile tranquility; presumably trying to gauge how amazing he thought the now-suffering crowd must have thought he was.
We left him to it, by which point he didn't seem to have enjoyed much success in his attempted conjuration of the Spirit of Horseshit.
As it happened we only drove just round the corner before coming upon the spot we're now at and hoping to kip. It's a pleasant enough scrap of land at the side of a typically deserted French unclassified road with nice open vistas. Best encounters have been a distant fox, a hen harrier and hearing our first cuckoo of the year.
The chosen spot also means the lorry's Hab-area entrance steps decant us on to hard pack mud with no vegetation. This is a good thing because it means I didn't have to prepare a Princess Pad. I mentioned in last year's blog that covered the Moldova trip that I may at some point explain this concept: it would seem the point is upon us.
Emma is - as has been well documented - pathologically paranoid about contracting exotic diseases, including Lyme disease. And that's all fair enough. Sometimes, though, if our often-crammed-in-a-tiny-space stopover spot means the truck steps overhang vegetation where ticks may be deemed to lurk, then a Princess Pad must be constructed before we can settle for the evening (my job).
This means the careful clearing / flattening of any tall herbs before covering the same with mulch / stones / earth or whatever else may be at hand in order to suppress the 'tick layer'. The area must then be clearly demarcated to indicate the neutralised controlled zone.
Only then may HRH deign to enter / egress by the conventional route.
Of course, come morning it's incumbent to return the area to as close to it's former state as possible (again, my job).
This ritual must be carried out without complaint whether ticks are actually present or simply imagined.
Behold, the Princess Pad.