Most of August is, of course, documented on
TravelsWithPickle. The whole month passed in a blur of family, friends and fascinating places, yet there were several highlights.
The biggest and best was to be together as a family for the first time since Cat and Andy's wedding in New Zealand two and a half years ago. We had already been looking forward to spending three happy weeks with Jonny and Adele, in the Pyrenees and travelling up to the Dordogne, but Cat and Andy's surprise visit to us in Axat was wonderful. Having left Iraq, en route to returning to New Zealand to await the arrival of their baby (and, in Andy's case, finish his Masters degree), they flew to Barcelona, hired a car and drove across the Pyrenees to meet us.
It was absolutely and undisputably the biggest pleasant shock of my life. (Mostly, shocks are not of the pleasant or kind variety. Another story.) Such a gift of time....
The farewells, though, arrived all too quickly. Jonny and Adele flew back to England from Toulouse; Cat and Andy drove back to Barcelona to catch a flight to Munich, Singapore, Darwin - to visit Andy's brother Jon - and then, eventually, Auckland.
It was quiet. The huge gap caused me a surprising amount of grief, though I tried to temper it, always, always, with gratitude for the gift of time together.
So motorhome life did, eventually, drop back into routine. Pickle was a little quiet, somewhat depressed (until we visited Bel and Richard and family, when she cheered up and had a wonderful time).
I continued, throughout, with nurturing the SCOBY which had miraculously survived extreme heat: the outside temperature, in the shade, was over thirty-eight degrees on one day: SCOBY worked triple time, producing kombucha within 24 hours. It - he - had also grown hugely: I had already separated him from his 'mother' a few weeks earlier, and pulled another 'baby' off the top, keeping both mother and baby separately in a close-fitting bowl in a SCOBY 'hotel'. (Yes, such is the language of kombucha making. Google it and prepare to have your mind blown with complicated instructions.)
We had other adventures with the kombucha manufacture, too. I managed to spill the tea one day, pouring it over the cooker, all over the floor and letting it trickle dangerously near the electrics. Another time, Richard moved the motorhome, not realising that the SCOBY was 'breathing' - i.e., didn't have a plastic lid sitting tightly on his container - and was just resting on the worktop. I came back in to the van to find liquid all over the floor (fortunately not, this time, near any electrics) and a surprised SCOBY sitting on top of said liquid.
Did I mention that kombucha is sweet and sticky?
Other wonderful benefits in August have been that our fitness has improved considerably, although not quite a the peak it was when we were walking uphill in the Pyrenees for up to five hours a day. My arthritic knee has benefited hugely through strengthening my leg muscles.
What else in August? Well, the weather was mostly very hot, apart from the odd cooler (as low as nineteen degrees!!) day towards the end of the month. We enjoyed foraging opportunities: blackberries, of course, but also wild strawberries in the Pyrenees, figs in Haute Garonne, blue plums, and 'Reine Claude' green plums in the Dordogne, early apples in Indre-Loire, wild thyme ...
And always enjoying the birdlife. Little owls at L'Isle sur Tarn; tawny owls at Chaillac; vultures, lammergeiers and eagles in the Pyrenees; buzzards everywhere. Redstarts, mountain chats, stone chats, swifts and swallows and, in the Loire, four magnificent white storks, taking flight from a field next to our cycle track. We even saw ospreys one day... And, of course, green woodpeckers were ubiquitous - the sound of summer in France.
Animals were rarer sightings, but we had glimpses of deer, cycled past a huge hare lolloping by a vineyard, foxes, And unusual roadkill we spotted included a rat, a snake, and a badger...among, sadly, many hedgehogs.
The month wound down quickly to the end. We returned to Guernsey on 1st September. The summer was over: back to reality...until the next time. Indeed, as Guernsey French has it: a la perchoine! To the next time!
