Welcome

Today I did the six-hour round trip to pick up the car from the garage. The insurance company won't make any profit from us this year because they had to pay for a taxi to take me there, which must have cost nearly as much as our premium. Still, everything went smoothly; we got there about 2:15, and when I started the car it sounded reassuringly healthy.

I hadn't had lunch, so on the way back I stopped in Villefranche de Conflent, for a bit of touristing. It's a medieval town, one of about 300 places in France whose fortifications were improved by Vauban in the seventeenth century. It's very well preserved, like a miniature Carcassonne with more tasteful shops.

It was far too late for lunch by French standards, so I chose the cafe closest to the main gate, which was offering multilingual platos combinados à toute heure. Here I joined the Spanish tourists for whom 3:30 was a perfectly reasonable lunchtime. My vegetarian platter was surprisingly good and not very expensive. Then I went for a stroll around town, during which I took a photo of this representative door. As a result of my dawdling, I got stuck in a traffic jam outside Perpignan,. but I was still home by 6.

Back home, the second event of the summer also took place in the salle des fêtes because of the wind. It was very poorly attended, and consisted of a duo of accordion and guitar, singing and telling rather gruesome stories about village life. It was neither photogenic nor interesting, so I took a couple of record shots and then sloped off home to blip and make bread.