Snow, Cistes and Simplicity

Like much of France, we’ve had more snow but a mere fraction of what fell on the north of the country. It’s probably Caití’s fault that we got any at all as she was desperate to see some snow. Down in tropical Bordeaux they don’t get the kind of winters we do here in chilly Creuse. You  may remember that we saved Caiti some snow from the heavy fall in February. She had fun playing with it this week…

And so did the cats!

We managed to fit a quick spot of geocaching in this week so Caits also got a pleasant walk through snowy woods. We were on the trail of another virgin (there are a lot around) – of the statue variety.

This one was another virgin of the rocks but a much more modest affair than her Protestant-scaring colleague at Roches.

We were warned in the clue that there was a ciste near to this cache, just a few metres away. Even our two bilingual university-going kids didn’t know what a ciste was so we erred on the side of caution in case it meant bottomless pit or man-eating monster. But we deduced that it must mean treasure trove when Chris stumbled across a cache that we weren’t looking for. (We never did find the ‘official’ one. The clue of ‘between the rocks’ wasn’t much help in a very rocky area! And, for the purists, a ciste is either an ancient term for a box for precious treasure or a  Mediterranean flowery arbour.) This box of little items and log box was marked as being part of Sur la piste des cistes, which is a French, less hi-tech version of geocaching, we found out after looking it up on the Internet after we got home.

We had quite a holy session as our first cache of the outing was near St Martin’s statue in Parsac.

There’s money in Parsac, which is really only a large village. It has the sphinx…

And also this rather splendid kids’ playground.

This has been created as part of a scheme to revitalise the countryside and make it more attractive for families with young kids.

This playground should help do the trick as it’s better than the one in Cork City! There is rather a lack of even small play areas for kids in rural areas. There seems to be this belief that town and city kids are somehow more sophisticated and need to be provided with fancy play and activity areas, but a stick and a dead fly are enough to keep a country kid happy for hours! Rural life may be simple, but that doesn’t mean to say the people who live that life are too.

And it’s still Christmas in Parsac! This little tree with its freaky alien space babies (probably meant to be angels) was at St Martin’s feet.