Walking and biking

We seem to have "theme days". On Sunday, we walked to the bricante (boot sale type market), that's less than 500 metres from here. We had gone specifically to see if we could find a bike worth buying, and although we saw about 40, they all seemed to be in different stages of disrepair. We did visit all of the stalls of used "stuff", and found it amazing what people will expect others to buy. We walked back for a leisurely breakfast and then decided we'd try to find the walk that our landlady, Carol, had suggested, so off we went across the bridge that overlooks the Roman arch that fell in the floods a month ago, and found a path along the river. Now, normally, this path would have been beautful, but the river rose so high, taking huge garbage containers with it (we saw 3 of the lids) that the trees and branches were littered with plastic. Evidence of how high the river rose was clear.

The various plastic pieces, bits of clothing, etc. are about 20-25 feet above the river, which now looks like a stream.

We continued to walk, and found ourselves following tractor paths through the middle of vineyards. It was hard to believe that huge swaths of agricultural land are so very near to a major city.

And then we contiued to walk some more. With some directional help from a jogger, we headed up a small road and three hours after we had left the apartment on our 45 minute walk, we returned!!

Yesterday we did the big box thing, looking for a bicycle. I found a great one for 199€ at Decathlon, a sporting goods store, kind of like MEC or Sports Chek. We then went to a Géant Casino where we saw 8 bikes, one of which would have been fine for 179€ but the seat was missing and could not be found. On to Carrefour and another bunch of bikes, one at 159€ that might work. But do I really want to buy a bike at a grocery store? I'll decide later in the week.

We arrived back home just in time to go to the Cave Cooperative (5 minutes by foot) and buy a couple of wines. This was our first (and definitely not our last) visit and the wine we chose was fabulous at 4.20€. 

We also chose a 2€ wine for cooking, marinating, etc. This is going to be sooooo much fun!

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