La Rochelle to La Jarne

Tuesday 20th October.
La Rochelle to Buzay Chateau (La Jarne)
We have found that the best way to plan our route is to ask our hosts for advice on where/what to see. By the time they have trawled through all the maps etc it is usually mid morning and everywhere is shut for lunch. Being Tuesday everything in La Rochelle was shut anyway, so no museums, but we explored the town which really is beautiful. It is one of the only places to have survived all the wars intact. The town hall was particularly impressive with a rather moving plaque to the Mayor of La Rochelle who had obviously been a very popular fellow. So much so that the Germans had removed him and executed him at the age of 79 in 1944. Thereafter the resistance was even stronger.
The Cathedrale was vast and quite impressive but rather spoiled by a very angry baby trying to gain his mother’s attention over his 5 brothers and sisters. The acoustics were amazing and he was positively deafening wherever you tried to hide. We had a quick lunch on a bench in the park overlooking the harbour and remembered our bottle of wine from yesterday. We were then joined by several other vagrants drinking various bottles out of brown paper bags and looking as grubby as us. It is the first town we have been to where there are a lot of beggars sitting on the streets but they must be richer than those at home as they all have 2 dogs. None of them have asked us for any money!
We then went along the coast past endless blocks of flats and summer village resorts, and I cannot get over how many boats there are in the various marinas, at one stage the sea of masts was so thick that you could not see across to the other side of the harbour. Eventually we turned inland towards the chateau at Buzay and made a major mistake in our map reading. It was pouring with rain and quite dark and in our haste we found ourselves joining a major road with a ‘Peage’ so had to push our bikes back against the traffic until we got on to the right route. Rather scary.
We stayed in the village of La Jarne and had a slightly sticky evening as the other guest was a rather monosyllabic and unfriendly fellow also eating supper with us. One thing in his favour was that he produced a rather good bottle of wine and amazingly all 4 of us only got through half of it! Small sips were the order of the day, accompanied by several courses of mainly vegetarian fayre. Our hostess was very kind and chatty. Whilst we were eating probably 2 inches of rain fell, the first they have had for 3 months and they have forecast much more to follow.