St Porchaire to Saintes

St Porchaire to Saintes
Friday 23rd October.
After a stunning supper in the local Auberge ‘Le Bruant’ in St Porchaire last night, and for anyone wanting a few days in a small hotel with good food it is very well placed for Cognac and the beaches etc. The menu was almost entirely offal, Calves head and kidneys, Pigs trotters and boudin, lambs testicles and brains, ducks livers chicken giblets etc etc presumably they had a deal with the local abattoir – we didn’t try them all but what we had was perfectly cooked and fortunately unrecognizable! Then, 2 miles home in the dark to work it all off.
The day started very well with the best ‘brioche de maison’ and many instructions on how to get to the Chateau Roche Courbon. It was a couple of miles along some forest tracks and for the first time you could really feel Autumn, the mist, damp, colours, falling leaves, scent and warm air had a heady effect and around a corner you come upon a beautiful 16th century chateau . It was built on a rock in the middle of the marais by M Courbon and was a lovely example of that period. It had been abandoned in the revolution for over 100 years, until a financier bought it and re-designed the whole place in the early 1900s. It was of particular interest to me as I think we visited it when us Kinahans were young, as I remembered the very scary grottos from 30,000 years ago in the forest. They are still quite scary and I thought I’d seen the last of Alec as he disappeared down a passage at the back of one of the caves. The garden is entirely built on the marsh and supported by huge oak timbers sunk into the ground to stop all their hard work disappearing into the bog. Every year they have to dig it up and replace many of them.
They had forecast a lot of rain so we decided to head into Saintes to look at some of the Roman ruins there. It was an easy ride along the river Charante through some picturesque villages with spectacular merchant’s houses overlooking it. We celebrated 1000+ miles (with a glass of fizz – Badoit, on a bench by the river)
By the time we reached Saintes it was raining quite hard so we went straight to the B&B only to be told they were off on holiday tomorrow so NO heating. If ever we were ready to strangle someone so to take revenge we used the hair dryer to dry our clothes and heat the room - it was not enough!
We then had a filthy dinner (actually I had horse steak and chips and it was delicious) so to console ourselves called in at the Bar Salisbury (next to the cathedral) which was a sort of jazz dive and full of inebriated men plus one bar girl. Vivi was immediately chatted up first by an intoxicated Frenchman and then by a 6’ 6’’ gent from the Bahamas who claimed to be an architect and a professor at the local university. Yeah pull the other one (definitely a dealer) we thought until we got home only to be told by madame that he’s ‘Winston’ a Dean at the college, charming and a pillar of the community – whoops!!