08/04/2006

French Holiday Improves

The food, wine and Touraine ambiance are working their magic and the worries of home seem far away. The problems we saw when we first arrived don't really seem too bad now. We've adopted the Gallic shrug and laissez-faire attitude that seems to come over us after a few days here and have settled into a comfortable routine of market shopping, coffee and croissants at little cafes and gentle weeding round some of the newly-planted-last-year plants, then stoking up the wood stoves for the evening food and wine.

Its lovely sunny weather with slight frost at night - just perfect. We've seen the first swallows and heard the cuckoo - Spring is really here.

Our "treat" for this holiday was to go for a meal here at the Chateau de Marcay - about 20 minutes across country lanes from us. It was very much better than the last time we went about 8 years ago but I don't think it's as good as our usual restaurant "AuPlaisir Gourmand" in Chinon. This is my all-time favourite, every meal there is excellent as you'd expect from its Michelin star. We had a spectacular meal there on New Years Eve 2004.

But we'd heard good reports of the Marcay and felt we should give it a try again. We both had the chef's recommendation of lobster with a sort of shellfish mousse for a first course and followed by rack of lamb for my husband and John Dory for me. It was a lovely evening and the food was good...but not up to the Plaisir's standard.

I'm managing to find a bit of time for knitting when I'm the only one awake in the early morning. Hopefully I should have some pictures of wips later.

And even the laptop is repaired (although I have yet to see if it still randomly switches off). I found a little shop or internet cafe you might say - I didn't know what it was when I went in and I was just hoping to find an external modem as a temporary cure but the owner offered to have a look at it and within an hour had fixed it at a very nominal charge.
He also recommended that I change my anti-virus software and suggested a free-download one that I've looked at and it seems good - its called "Avast". I might try this as he certainly seemed to know what he was talking about but it might be too slow to download on this dial-up. Might wait till I get home for that.

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