Crossing Bridges

We’ve made the most of the few short spells of good weather we’ve had during the school winter holiday break to fit in a couple of outings.

Last Monday we went geocaching at Bois de Lassoux, a spot we’ve been quite a few times and did a llama trek at once. We ended up walking all the way down to St Ragonde’s chapel.

St Ragonde is the patron saint of thunder. If a thunderstorm broke out in the old days, someone would run up to the chapel and ring the bell to make it stop!

On the way we saw our first frogspawn of the year…

and managed to avoid falling through the rotten wood on this bridge.

The only downside to the afternoon’s walk was that I forgot to pack the biccies for an energising snack but fortunately Caiti had some sweets with her so we didn’t suffer too much.

And yesterday, now Caitiless since she’s back in Bordeaux, Chris, Rors, Nessie and I went to Neris les Bains. It was another walk with geocaches along the route but we had to pull the plug on that. There were too many muggles (muggles = passers-by). In fact you could hardly move for joggers and cyclists all in very shiny lycra outifts. The bizarre thing with the cyclists was that they were all riding mountain bikes and the old railway line that the walk is on is flat as a pancake and a hard surface all the way. Could there have been a touch of posing going on, I wonder?

Anyway, it was a pleasant enough walk. But then, when it got to midday, everyone disappeared! It was eerie. One moment, the ground reverberated to the pounding footsteps of joggers, and the next, there was just us.

The viaduc walk is along a railway line that was built in the 1920s but closed in the 1960s and has been a public walk since 1976. The sign definitely said it was a voie pietonné so possibly the bikes shouldn’t have been there at all. Quite a lot of them weren’t being very considerate towards the pedestrian users, going a lot faster than was sensible. And I’m a cyclist myself so for me to criticise others shows that I was pretty annoyed.

Anyway, it was a morning out in the sunshine and there were some nice views. Here’s Nessie enjoying one.

The final part of the walk back to the car park gave us this rather lovely view of one of the viaducs (there are three altogether along the walk/jogging highway).

So, we won’t be rushing back to the viaduc walk but it made for an interesting visit. However, there are Roman baths in Neris les Bains (hence the name) so perhaps we’ll call by those sometime.