Lafayette

From the area around Puy de Dôme, on South towards Le Puy en Velay, by means of a meandering route through wonderful views, and via a little museum dedicated to general Lafayette, set up in his place of birth. 

He was a French politician and warrior who, as well as fighting for the French revolution, helped the American army during the American revolution.  Thanks, pal. 

What I liked about this museum is that it doesn't shrink from publishing comments about him by his enemies and detractors, so you come away with a more rounded idea of the person than is usual.  It has a nice garden too, not too big, but with old trees and pleasant views.  The Acer palmatun dissectum was at least 7 feet high, it must be several hundred years old.

Holiday snaps

There is plenty of countryside in the Auvergne to see and walk through, far more than I can do justice to with photographs and blog posts.  Before we left the area of Clermont-Ferrand and in addition to the Puy de Dôme, we walked through woods, along a stream, had some good food (L'âne gris did me a nice lunch in Riom), and a generally nice and relaxed time.

Puy de Dôme

If you are in the area and the weather is even halfway decent, a visit to the Puy de Dôme is a must.  Its peak is at 1,465 metres,  and it offers spectacular views over the surrounding countryside.

It was a hot day, 32 degrees or so in the afternoon, so we took the train up to the peak.   This left us with plenty of energy to explore the summit, you can walk round it, take in the chains of volcanoes stretched out below you, you get a distant view of Vulcania (the best way to see it, in my opinion) and of Clermont-Ferrand some 15Km to the East.

There was a gentle wind blowing, just enough for paragliders to be able to maintain height, or gain some with a bit of skill and luck.   They dotted the sky with their coloured wings, and since we have both done a little in the past, we were able to appreciate and enjoy watching their technique.

Incidentally, there is a little monument to a prize-winning flight that was made from Paris to the top of the Puy de Dôme in 1911, in a time of under 6 hours.  The feat was thought to be impossible, and the prize of £4,000 was a considerable incentive.  A bit like the X-Prize today.
 
The sites at the top and bottom of the mountain, and the train itself, have recently been redeveloped using a budget of nearly 97 million Euros of taxpayers' money.   The site isn't completely finished yet, but the new modern rack-and-pinon electric train that takes you to the top is in service.  The information panels tell us that using careful energy management, the train coming down provides half the electricity needed by the train going up, which would be a good thing, except there was only one train on the track.

The train ran once per hour, and took about 15 minutes or so to reach the top, where it waited for 15 minutes before coming down again.  So you could be waiting up to 45 minutes for the train, and guess what there wasn't any of, on the platform, for waiting passengers?  Yep, seats.  Well in truth, at the bottom station there were three folding chairs that looked like they had been bought on expenses at Super-U or the like.   It seems to me that the people who are most likely to want to take the train are those who are least able to make the 45-minute hike up to the top, so would be the most in need of a chair.  Who designs this stuff?

The main holiday season starts in July and we were there in the off season, towards the end of June.  The train, when it set off, was nevertheless full, with passengers standing in the aisles  because all of the seats were taken.  I think they have a capacity problem.  The train was as long as could be accepted by the platform, so it can't be made any bigger without big structural changes, but it could probably be split into two, since there were 4 carriages I think, and there was a passing place halfway up the mountain to allow trains to cross each other.  But running trains of half the size every half hour instead of one big one every hour doesn't increase the capacity at all; I think the best they would be able to manage is to run the trains every 20 minutes, an increase in capacity of 50%.  Doesn't look like enough to me.

There was no air conditioning in the train, and in 32 degree outside heat, with big glass windows, it got hot.  The platform at the bottom was open to the air, the platform at the top was enclosed, and was air-conditioned.   So people catching the train down would get on the train, bake for a bit, decide it was better on the platform, and go out again to sit (on the floor, of course) before getting back on the train again just before it left.

I'm starting to think that France doesn't "do" tourism.  I'll elaborate on this theme, some time when the muse takes me, and I've thought about it a bit more.

The Auvergne

We had enough time between guests for a quick trip to the Auvergne, a part of France focused on the Massif Centrale and famous for its volcanic landscape and mineral water (not forgetting the lentils, A.O.C, naturally).

We had heard about Vulcania, the exhibition/museum/theme park about volcanoes, so that was the first stopping point as an orientation excercise, and the nearby Puy du Dôme is the highest point in the volcanic system, so that was the second.   There's not much point in my telling you what Vulcania is; they have a website here that explains things quite well, and in English too.  I can give you my impression of the place though, which is that I was underwhelmed.  We both were.  Not much whelming going on at all.

Perhaps the fundamental problem is that there isn't actually any real volcanic activity going on that you can see, and no amount of translucent plastic with red lights shining through it can disguise this fact.  Sure it's possible to make a museum, and to show real layers of now-cold lava flow, and to have rides that evoke some aspects of the experience of volcanoes, but none of it, none at all, is happening, volcanic action.

So you have a combination theme park, museum and exhibition about volcanoes.  The theme park rides were of the "moving platform" type that shake you about while you watch a film.  They spray you a bit in the wet bits and one had infra-red lamps so you feel hot when looking at molten lava.  And the 3-D dragons were cute, but not much to do with volcanoes.

There was a fountain that they call the geyser, that by pushing buttons you can make do different things to illustrate geyser-type activity, but at the end of the day, it's a fountain.

The VulcanBul is an autonomous car, illustrating the "car of the future".  Battery-powered, driver-less, and steered automatically by GPS, it is covered in what I think is perspex so you get a clear view of the outside.  It goes at about 3 MPH, and a commentator, who could also be driving if it was drivable, tells you what it is you're looking at.   But according to the description, it doesn't run in bad weather, which seems to me to be the time when one would most appreciate a ride outside and under cover.  I don't know if this is because the technology doesn't work in the rain, or if it's because of some management policy, but it struck me that they'd have been better off with a horse-drawn buggy.   Probably more representative of the car of the future, too.

We were told to allow a whole day for the visit, which is probably necessary in high season if you want to do all the rides, because there were Disney-esque queuing systems in place for use in times of high demand, that will delay your appreciation of the site.

Verdict:  Only if your kids are into geology or volcanoes, or it's raining and they're getting fractious (and they don't want to go on the VolcanBul).

Strange plants

The Iris have finished flowering, so now is the time to split up the corms of those that have spread too far, and replant them.  I spent most of the day doing this.  On the way I noticed these two strange plants in the garden.  I think the first one is some kind of wild orchid, and I think the second one is some kind of fungus.  Anyone able to identify them for me?

Sunshades

During the warmer Summer months, our gîte guests like to have a barbeque, usually on Sundays, for lunch.  They can sit out on the terrace, enjoy the garden and sunshine, and tuck into steaks, chops and sausages, with a glass or two if they're not driving home that afternoon.

The terrace is fully open to the afternoon sun, and sometimes this can become oppressive, so we have been keeping an eye open for a means of shading it.  You can mount awnings on the wall, but the terrace extends beyond the end of the building, so either the awning would be too short, or some elaborate frame would be needed so support the protruding end.

As an alternative, you can get nice free-standing metal frames with cotton coverings but they're hard to fit precisely around the tables, and would be awkward to get into and out from.

The solution? Four expanding umbrella-like parasols, placed along the length of the tables, that can be opened or closed to the suit the number of people at table, and tilted to compensate for the sun's changing position in the sky.  Less that 50 euros each, so 200 euros for four; much cheaper than the other options.  They're mounted on stands held down with paving slabs to match the terrace finish (52 euros for the 32 slabs required)

The paving slabs are, incidentally, much cheaper than the option proposed by the shop: special weights designed for the purpose, 4 required per parasol at 25 euros each. i.e. twice as much in total than the parasols themselves.

And it's an excuse for a photograph of my Sage plants: herbs for the kitchen, and decoration for free as a bonus!

Foxgloves

When I was introduced to Foxgloves as a child, I was intrigued.  Why did foxes need gloves?  Did they sneak up in the night to pull the flowers off and slide them onto paws for silent slinking?  I tried slipping my fingers into the flowers on the plants, but they didn't seem very practical: no grip.  And my parents warned me about the possibility of bees being inside so I might get stung.

If you have a spot in your garden with dappled shade,  where the soil doesn't get too dry, Foxgloves can be a good idea.   Under the trees along our drive seemed like a good spot so I bought a packet of seeds of special hybrid ones few years ago, and the 6 or 8 plants I got from it managed to survive. 

Foxgloves are biennial, so you plant them one year to flower the next, and they die after flowering.  So when I am cutting off the old flower spikes, I do a little medicine dance with them, shaking the seed pods over the ground so that there's plenty of seed for next year's crop.  As long as I don't weed the bed too closely, and just let them grow, there's normally some flowers the following year.

Sometimes I get a few plants, sometimes a lot.  This year has been unusual, with the entire bed covered in Foxgloves.  There's self-seeded Aquilegia and Sage too, all adding to the natural look and blending in with the blue-to-pink shades.  The Rose bushes and Lilly plants are completely hidden by all this, but in a couple of years they will be too big to hide.  And meanwhile, I think the effect is quite special.