Cosne sur Loire

I spent a drizzly Sunday afternoon in Cosne sur Loire last weekend. (is it Thursday already? where did the week go?) Looking through my photos today, I realise I didn't take a single one of the town. There weren't any really interesting perspectives, and the light was poor, and, well, it was just so much like so many other small French towns. If I were to mix up my Small French Town photos instead of classing them neatly into folders, I'd never be able to tell them apart.

.

A stroll around town looking for a room for the night revealed five hotels, two of which seemed deserted, one wasn't open Sundays (???), one was full, and the last one, the one right across from the train station and over the inevitable near-station bar, had a room. A surprisingly nice room, considering, though I didn't score a bathtub. I didn't even have neighbors.

.

After another stroll around town looking for a picnic lunch to take away pretty much did it for the town. The Grand Chateau advertised on the map was meerly a large wall around a crowded parking lot, with a bit of city hall attached in a 19th century addition, so off I went up the hiking and mountain bike trail that follows the Loire upstream for several miles. One of the houses overlooking the river. There's a whole string of these mansions with their enormous yards. Most of them put up a great hedge along the bottom fence for a bit more privacy. Nobody much was out in the sporadic drizzle except for the birds. Woodpeckers, herons, coots, swans, songbirds, all along the waterfront. And crows. France is a country of crows. Contentious. Building their condominiums with a view. Repositioning themselves in the trees. Cawing, cawing, cawing.

I eventually came to the railroad bridge across the river. Unused by trains these days, it's now part of a rail-bike route that goes 20 km or so.

Here's the railbike contraption. All the bicycle seats are stored in a neighboring shed, awaiting The Season when families will reserve their places and go cycling up and down the railway. It still being March, nobody was out and I had the bridge to myself.

At the turnaround point for the short version of the hiking loop is St Bridget's chapel. Locked up tight. It must be awfully dim inside, because there aren't any more windows on the far side than there are on this side. That's dark.

My feet declared themselves not up for the long version (it is a biking trail; the long version is pretty long), so I took the short way back to town.

The angels on one of the churches in town hold a miniature version of the church, which I thought was kind of fun. Locked up tight like St Bridget's, alas. Unusually, all three of the historical monument churches were locked.

Duck on one of the canals channelling water through the town to the Loire.

That canal opens up into a sort of kayak playground, where today a youth competition was in its final stages. Kids as young as 8 or 9 were negotiating the complicated course, cheered on by family and friends from the banks and the bridge.

.

Back at the station I bought my ticket to Paris for my Monday meeting, then hung out at the hotel for a rest and a shower. Around 7 I went out for another stroll, thinking that the light from across the river in the west might give me at last a nice panoramic of the town. So I crossed the bridge, but the clouds were uncooperative and there was ugly scaffolding in unfortunate spots and it just wasn't pretty.

.

Strolling around town there weren't many places open for dinner. I thought I might be dining on oreos from the station vending machine when at last I found an open restaurant. They were serving a fairly classic french menu, nothing fancy, from which I ordered the goat cheese salad, steak with pepper sauce, and crème brulée. The salad did not bode well for the rest of the meal - sad greens topped with a multitude of bacon pieces that would have been ok if not nearly raw, goat cheese on toast (burnt), the whole thing drowned in bottled dressing. The main dish, however, was quite tasty. A small steak but I didn't need more, not overcooked, delightfully peppery sauce, with super-garlic wild mushrooms (I like garlic), green beans, and potato gratinée. None of it fresh but the steak, I'm sure, but I'm easy to please with garlic and potatos.

Anyway, on a Sunday evening with only me and a pair of friends for customers, is our chef restauranteur really properly serving the whole menu? There's rabbit and lamb and salmon and chicken available in various forms, a whole battery of starters, a big list of desserts - how do you keep a restaurant open if you have all that, fresh, at your fingertips for just three plates at highly reasonable prices?

I was just happy my host was even open, the alternative being takeout pizza, or machine food at the station.

And that was it for Cosne. Next adventure next weekend, destination as yet undecided.

.

.

100 words: warble

My cat Natalie is the sort who doesn’t need to come in for dinner; she’ll just pick up the odd mouse or bird as it suits her. Some years ago, possibly in the acquisition of such a catsnack, she suffered an injury to her throat. Some thing that clawed back, or bit. She has not meowed properly since. Last night she woke me after midnight to come in, and spent a while gagging and coughing from some part gone down wrong, calming down then starting up again, finally getting out a warbly-normalish meow by two. Then we could all sleep.

100 words: Drenched

The first words dropped into the 100 bucket came from random finger-pointing in the Economist, and the non sequitur of “...safer if drenched...” caught my eye. I’ve been toying with it, waiting for the right joke to form itself around a punchline. Never happened. The world is in such a state, the evening news has barely run any of their usual local stories of car crashes and sports scores and unemployment and who’s running for head of the socialist party. Instead it’s been:

Nuclear fuel rods: safer if drenched.

Triangle Shirtwaist Building: safer if drenched.

Qaddafi’s gunpowder: safer if drenched.

Monday poem

This week's P-Bus task, set by the fabulous Muse, is to write about something without naming the thing in the poem or the title. Here we go!

.

Savior .

Hot Hot Hot the morning

smooth with milk washing down

the crumbs of the toast with jam.

.

A welcome pause midmorning

around the pot one of the group, not so much the boss.

.

Finally a finish to lunch

strong and warm to power me through the afternoon

counteracting the post prandial urge to nap.

.

Not much of an enigma, but it follows the rule. If it looks funny it's because Blogger seems to have forgotten what the "return" key is all about, and keeps erasing all my careful mise en page. Corrected it four times already and always the same result. Catch the bus here!

yard work

Part of the veg patch here. Along the right, the potato patch. And you can't tell, now I've covered it with a nice fluffy blanket of dried grass (we're still having light frost some mornings), but between the potatos and my shadow is a patch 4' x 5' of sweet corn. I'll do a second such patch in two or three weeks. I plan to cultivate all the way to the top of the photo, and after taking this shot turned over a strip the width of the enclosure, about three feet across, where the grass is taking hold now. It's tough grass! That's the part I didn't get around to turning over in the fall, once the tomatos and peas were done, and the grass really got going.
Not a very good photo, but the rhubarb patch is coming back. Just by my foot is where I took the pitchfork on Tuesday and ripped a chunk of rhubarb root away from the mother ship to give to a friend, accessory earthworm and all. This thing is monstrous. It covers about four square feet of ground, with dozens of tiny, wrinkled leaflets just coming up and unfolding in the sun.

The elderly cherry tree still puts out lots of blossoms in the spring. It's even slightly ahead of the other trees. It just rarely has any edible fruit.

I'm always finding walnut shells scattered around the yard. Here, in the crux of the old cherry where some major limbs have been lopped off. These are new shells. Where do they all come from? Why is Natalie not fat from eating all these nut-loving rodents?

.