14.01 Day 120 . . . Reclamation Yard

I'm still breathing, I'm still breathing
I'm still breathing, I'm still breathing
I'm alive . . . .
. . . So says Sia in her song ‘Alive’ and fortunately despite the issue with the fridge yesterday morning so were we, last nights chicken/bacon/sausage meat masterpiece hadn’t done us any harm.
As Tre has sorted to collect the pottery last night we decided to leave at about 11am and make our way towards Le Dorât. So having got ourselves sorted and breakfasted we made tracks, picking up fuel at Sauze on route.
We’d not been this far east so once we passed Civray and Charroux we were pretty much in unchartered territory.
The weather again had been pants all morning and continued during our drive east. Not long after Charroux I noticed a large artic lorry was behind me and when I say behind me - I mean by about two feet. For mile after mile he sat right on the backside of Roxvanne simply because I was sticking to the speed limits. So two can play that game and so I purposely slowed down on the approach to hills, simply to make him struggle and give me some space as we ascended. After five minutes or so he would have caught me up and so I waited to the next hill and played the same game. This went on for miles!
At about 1230 Tre messaged the guy to ensure the pottery was going to be at Le Dorât. - he replied that Le Dorât wasn’t open on a Saturday afternoon . . . Not what he had said last night. So after a little bit of heated exchange in Rox we decided to drive to their other store about another half an hour further - to La Souterraine.
Before we got to the store in La Souterrain we stopped for a coffee and a quiche in the town centre. La Souterraine seemed quite a a nice town with a lot of shops, which may make us drop back here at some point for a further investigation.
After coffee we drove to the store ‘Bonkers’ and entered. We were shown the bowl and jug that Tre has asked for to be reserved, which was lovely. Put on the counter for payment, we then had a further look around the rest of the store - sort of an antique/second hand affair. Half hour later we decided there was nothing more for us to grab and so we paid up for the bowl and jug and made tracks.
Back at Rox we made a quick decision to drive back to Confolens and to a place I’d seen called The Reclamation Yard. According to the sat nav we would get there with under 30 minutes before closing time.
Still driving through torrential rain we headed back west to Confolens. Confolens is one of the towns we still want to visit as it is known to be quite picturesque with a river running through it.
The yard was outside of Confolens at 64 Ansac-sur-Vienne, as we arrived with it still pouring with rain. We had 25 minutes to rush around.
As we entered the initial open yard the owner appeared. We apologised for being so late and could we have a quick 10 minutes to see roughly what he had - so we could come back another time better informed. He was cool and on realising we will probably be wanting a lot from him when and if the house sale goes through - he was more than happy for us to stay as long as we wanted. The place was huge with about four to five large warehouses some with four floors and basements. It had everything from beds to chandeliers, all sorts of cut timber to huge pieces of cut bark, machinery to concrete lintels and pretty much everything in between. We realised we were gonna need ages to investigate this place and so after about 15 minutes we found the owner again, informed him we would be back Monday and wished him a good evening.
The place was a real goldmine of everything we might want, we both drove home talking about the small amount of bits we had actually seen. We hadn’t even done outside due to the crap weather.
Within an hour we were back at our place, still raining we ran for the Gite and the dry.
We were both not really hungry and elected that cheese and biscuits, some chorizo and a bottle of red from the ‘off licence’. (Hannah’s store room) was all that was needed.
We spent the now evening, still listening to the rain, sorting some issues back in the UK and enjoying our comfort dinner whilst watching the final episodes of The Killing.
Tomorrow if it’s not raining we have promised to help Hannah with moving some logs that have been delivered. We don’t need them, but she really needs some help. So fingers crossed it’s lashing down all day tomorrow 😂Leggi altro