Starting our time at Mareuil-sur-Cher

Our little Chateau Tour de France 2007 ? Our next investment !

Since our arrival here on Saturday 22nd July we have been on the move. We went to the local " flea Market in the village on Sunday & bought 2 bikes to get around before we pick up our car on the 15th August. Already we have cycled into the next village & have been on shorts little tours near the village.
As you can see from the photo ( horray I've finally been able to attach them ) we have a great setup here & have a vegie garden with tomatoes, lettuce, beans, eggplant & 2 trees loaded with plums. We have already made 2 big pots of stewed plums that are nice to have with muesli & yoghurt each morning.
Sebastien the gardener has kindly lent us a Peugoet 306 until he goes on holidays on the 10th August so on Wednesday we took a trial run to Montrichard & Amboise stopping in both towns to have a look in awe at the age of them with Amboise at the heighth of its glory in the 15th century.
With the car we go to the next town of St Aignan to do our main shopping as there is a very good supermaket ( supermarche ) called SuperU. Still trying to get used to driving L/H drive but each day I get better.
Yesterday was the best day for weather since our arrival as it was too hot on arrival to do much looking around & since then we have had 3 or 4 days where it was much cooler & raining. Yesterday was mid twenties so we decided to venture further east through St Aignan to Selles-sur-Cher.

What a magnificent little place this was so cute with narrow little streets, as clean as a whistle but as usual being near lunchtime no one was around only the occasional tourist. We were feeling a little peckish so stopped for nice baguette sandwich & a cleansing Heineken ( certainly better than we get at home ) & then moved on to Villefranche-sur-Cher, turning off at Thenioux & returning back to St Aignan where we did some much needed shopping before returning to Mareuil. It had been a good drive covering about 120kms, so we are progressing.

Just to make it easy for price comparisons I've worked on $A1.00 being E.50 so a litre of petrol here is E1.30 making it $A2.60, I filled up the car yesterday & it cost me E61.00 ( $A132.00) ( glad it wasn't the Statesman), beer in a bar E2.50 ( $A5.00 ) for 250ml so not cheap while you can pick up quite drinkable wine from E2.80 ( $A5.60 ) & whisky like Grants for E13.00 ( $A26.00). Hair Shampoo, Sun Lotion & skin creams are expensive ( according to Sara ) we paid E9.00 ( $A18.00 ) for a normal size tube. Other items which are expensive are stamps, whether it is a postcard or letter to OZ it costs E.90 ( $A1.80 ) .

I had better sign off as I need to do some vegie picking & other gardening duties, will be in touch soon from Mareuil.