Noirmoutier-en-l’Île 13 June 2016

Another on-the-road adventure with French lack of signage. It's almost like it's a tease, "We'll show you signs until your almost there, and then we'll leave one key sign out!" We crossed the swampy area north of La Rochelle, now drained and agricultural. A cool old church in a hilly village. Lots of traffic.

We're at home at the far northwestern tip of Noirmoutier, in the little fishing village of Herbaudière. The weather today is crappy all over France. Our host, Flore, says "This is not June weather. This is April weather. Now it should be 24° and we should be going swimming."

But the house is spacious, the kitchen is well provided with necessities, and market day is tomorrow. Rochelle is doing a laundry, and I'm going to read my book. 

We expanded into our house, read, took a nap ... and the weather improved, so we took a walk out to the beach and then across the island -- we're at the very narrow end -- to the harbor, where the sky mostly cleared, although the wind continues to whistle through the telephone wires. Surveyed the restaurant scene, bought a few things to make into dinner at home, and wandered through this very tucked in, very prosperous little enclave.

As you might expect this far north, this is a wild and wooly coast. Flore is probably right about the water temperature, which is pretty warm for this latitude, thanks to the Gulf Stream. When (not if) it shuts down, there's going to be some chilly Europeans!

A good day for geography. Here we are somewhat south of Seattle, well north of Burlington, Vermont ...and way north of Caspar. And headed north-er.

Europe, and especially France, has been bashed this last few weeks with major out-of-season storms (not to mention labor unrest and a complete duck outage!) Two weeks ago, the keepers of the Louvre were scurrying around to move their treasure out of the basement before it flooded. (It didn't, but it could have.) This week, what my Austrian friend calls "the weather frogs" -- she means, the climatologists and meteorologists -- declared that Global Weirding caused the storms in France (but not, they hastened to add, the same storms in Germany. Go figure.)