France part 2: The zoo, abbeys and shopping

[inulro]

The trip had a bit of an inauspicious start - on the M4, a big rock hit the windscreen and took a nasty chunk out. Right in front of my face. Yikes! Then we got to Portsmouth and I realized that while I had the insurance documents and all the equipment one needs to make one's car legal in France, I'd completely forgotten the vehicle registration document. Good thing we didn't get stopped.

I survived the overnight ferry, but didn't sleep. I blame the getting lost getting out of LeHavre on sleep deprivation, and further in my defence is the fact that it was raining so hard I couldn't read the signs. It was raining so hard that we could barely see the Pont de Normandie, which is the closest thing to a tourist attraction in LeHavre.

We were staying at a house owned by a friend just outside Poitiers. Despite not meriting a Rough Guide or a Lonely Planet guidebook, there's quite a lot of stuff to do in the area. If I was more enterprising, I'd write to said guidebook companies with a proposal to research one.

We had a great deal of fun at the zoo. There's lots of zoos in the area, but the one we chose focuses on European wildlife - wolves, lynxes, European bison (which I thought were extinct, but only in the wild) etc. It's the right time of year because most of the animals have babies. It's also set in the middle of some primeval forest, which is kinda scary in itself. Or maybe I read too many Grimm fairy tales as a child.

There's lots of abbeys in the area, the only one anyone's likely to have heard of is St Savin. Despite being a UNESCO world heritage site this is still the parish church, and thus free to go in. The gift shop next door had some excellent stuff, but I was very restrained and didn't buy anything.

In fact, I was doing very well money-wise until we went shopping in Poitiers. Last time, we found a discount clothing store in Carcassonne that was full of great stuff and came out with two hugs bags of clothes for a total of 80, and I was hoping to do that again. It didn't work out quite like that - I have a pair of Nice Sandals that cost more than I normally spent on boots, and a couple of outfits that, while not expensive, were not cheap either. Whoops.

On the way back we stopped for crepes in Chartres, and discovered a shopping area we hadn't known existed. One day, I will visit Chartres when I'm not making a mad dash for the ferry.

Got back to find the house in one piece, but a note from the pet sitter said that new bunny Jerry had not behaved himself. I'm suitably mortified.

Comments

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

The bison were probably from Poland, there are still some relatively wild herds there.

I was wandering round High Park the other day and stumbled across their little zoo, and the 4 or 5 bison therein. It was a bit on the depressing side. I can barely imagine what a real herd must have looked like, like a millon furry VW Beetles sweeping majestically across the plains.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I've seen bison in big nature preserve type environments, which gives you a bit better idea of what it must have been like before they were mostly killed off. The ones in the High Park zoo are kinda depressing.