Day 7 - the road to the Meditteranean, and Vendez des Glacons? Do you sell ice?

Today we hauled some backside! This morning was beautiful on the farm, we managed to drag the missus out of bed for an 8 oclock breakfast. Grapes grown on the farm, fresh bread and buns with homemade jams: cassis(black currant), apricot(abricot) and fraise(strawberry). They had plenty of coffee and tea for us both and with full bellies we hit the road to Perigeux. We arrived in Perigeux and had a quick look around, but by now we were getting anxious to get to the Mediterranean.

We found an internet café and manged to get some stuff uploaded (the day 2 stuff) but their security wouldn't let me access my memory card directly, so I could upload the photos, but not the text. It was funny, because it was big nerdery computer lab with a bunch of young guys playing Counter Strike online. "Merdre" !!! "Flash!!" "Merdre!! Hahahah!!" etc… Those of you (Steve and Dan) that hae played CS know what I'm talking about.

It was hot, encore. And after an hour of screwing around we got outta there. 3 Euro. French keyboards are diff than ours too. Some of the letters are in diff spots so it was a little aggravating.

Cruising the highway at 130-140km/h periodically there was rest stops. We needed ice for the cooler, and I continued the game of "silly bugger" trying to ask for something they had never heard of before. There is no word for ice cube recgognized in some parts of France. Really, they don't have them. The word is glacon fyi, but I have been told glacee, glacier,. De glace. De glacier, de glacee. But you get the idea…. Joanna was calling me the Ice Man Cometh ala Gregory Peck because I kept stopping at these places asking for ice cubes. -More blank looks like I just arrived from another planet!

We saw the coolest Medieval city today, near Carcoassone I think. We stopped and took a few pics from afar. If it hadn't ruined our plans to make it to the Med, we would have stopped. A la prochaine….(next time).

It is getting a lot more Spain looking around here, and we finally made it down to Norbanne beach. It was foggy at 5 when we rolled into town and it pt progressively worse until when we were drinking champagne on the beach at 8:00 wathcing some guy fishing - visibility was maybe 1000 meters.

Left Lane Bandits, a North American phenomenon. On the highway, people pass in the left lane, then go back to the right. In fact the practice is to keep ypu left turn signal on when you are in the passing lane presumeably to increase your visibilty to overtaking and overtaken traffic alike. Seems to work very well.

Our room tonight is "lack lustre" but close enough to the water that the waves of the Med crashing on the beach almost drown out the Karaoke next door. But what do you expect for 60 Euros a night? We had a great evening walking on the beach and drinking champagne that we bought at that domaine winery yesterday? We are at the Med and ready for a couple days R&R which means we have to drive once again :( . We are going to Sanary sur Mer tomorrow. And we will hopefully spend 2 or 3 days there or nearby. A moped rental and wine tours are on the agenda. Plenty of pics to come, I felt a little guilty taking so little today, but we were on the road , so driving took precendence. There were some chateaus and domaines that would blow your mind though.

The karaoke has started up and the dogs are howling! So we're going to call it quits for the day. We have the patio door fiull open which if it weren't for the fog you could see the med, but we can hear it fine. It's damp, warm, and it's the south of France baby!!!