Le Mans (Part Two) - Too Much Wine Cow
by Phil LongPart two of my France holiday round-up, and this covers days five and six of my trip to Le Mans - Wednesday July 9 and Thursday July 10.
Having visited the Abbaye de L’Apau and being disappointed previously we decided to make two stops at places very close to one-another; Asnieres-Sur-Vegré and the Abbey at Solesmes.
We got to Asnieres at around lunch time and had a little stroll up to a ‘view point’ where we ate food we brought along with us. While being a viewing point, it didn’t really afford much over site of the village, but was still a pleasant enough spot, with the reconstructed 13th Century court house dominating the view of the village below.
After our lunch we wandered around a bit, following the signs to the key locations in the village. These included the church and the wash house, as well as a bridge across the river.
After a while we had worked up a thirst and so headed back to the Battle bus. With time to kill before heading to Solesmes, we headed to Sablé-Sur-Sarthe (where Tufty, Carl and I had moored for a night last year) and got some beer and ice cream before heading to the Abbey.
The Abbey is a very impressive building that stands tall over the bank of the river Sarthe.
It is an active monastery, which is to say there are monks living behind it’s walls and each day they have several services throughout the day conducted in Gregorian Chant/Song. After walking around the outside of the Abbey we headed in for the 5pm service; quite appreciating the coolness inside the attached church. That, combined with the Gregorian song, made for a very relaxing experience - that said we weren’t keen on staying for the whole service and thankfully it seemed pretty normal that people didn’t stay throughout the whole thing.
As the day was so pleasant we headed back to the Falcon and attempted out first barbeque of the holiday. Here two things of note occurred.
First off, the bad charcoal I think I’d left on a previous trip was not keen on being lit - or staying lit for any reasonable length of time to be considered safe to cook on. We tried a couple of times to get it going, but ultimately reached the conclusion it was failing. We resorted to using the gas barbeque on the boat which prior to this holiday we had never done. It actually works pretty well though, and at least avoided the almost impossible task of keeping the existing charcoal usable for cooking on.
The second thing of note, I believe, is directly related to the length of time it took to get anything cooked - while still being sat out in the sun. We naturally drank beer and later turned to the Wine Cow (a box of wine, called Wine Cow because you have to squeeze the last half-glass out). Time seemed to disappear, as did the Wine Cow itself, resulting in us opening a second Wine Cow. Some time around 2am I went to sleep, but Tufty, Paul and Luci remained awake for longer and the result was that we made a serious dent in the content of the second Wine Cow. Next day we arose at some time past midday feeling extremely worse-for-wear.
Our recovery was to head to MacDonalds (where I discovered free and open Wireless) for junk food - the only resort for extreme hangovers. I managed to eat a Royal Cheese, fries and a strawberry milkshake (along with a few nuggets). Paul and Luci also managed to hold their food down. Tufty however determined that anything that went down would come up, so had just a few bites before deciding his stomach wasn’t in any condition to handle food.
As you can probably guess, this made Thursday a write-off.
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