les Davey de France

Last night we had discreet and gentle storms with, thunder, lightning, rain and everything except those nasty strong winds. I, meanwhile, was having trouble sleeping, so I saw some of the show, paying for it with mosquito bites on both legs. I've not posted any photos of Paris yet. They will come. I'm drip-feeding them into Instagram and thence into Facebook. Once all has been done I'll pop some on here.

To combat the heat the SNCF are distributing bottled water at the central railway station, the bus and tram company are giving free granitas at Quinconces and at the place where trams A and B cross a little team of folk are on hand to spray passers-by with water - the "pschit-pschiteurs".

We did our outside chores early, then lowered the shutters, closed the windows, put on the fans, washed towels and hung them around to dry and managed to keep the temperature in the flat down to 30.5°C.

The morning after the Fête Nationale we packed quickly and sped off by fast train to Paris where we had booked four nights in an AirBnB not far from Montmartre and Sacré Coeur. Our goal was to explore parts of Paris that we'd never seen and, perhaps, to kindle that affection for the city that we see in so many others. We live just 10 minutes walk from the station so we stopped off at McDonald's to buy salads to eat on the way, our train left at noon. The place was very crowded indeed and salads are not the most high volume sellers, so we waited rather longer than we felt comfortable with before charging off to the platform, where there was nobody to check our tickets, and installing ourselves in our upper-storey seats. The train gives you a good view of the changing French countryside, vines giving way to sunflowers, then to pastureland, then to wheat fields that you just long to run through. Bordeaux is just two hours from Paris by train - if you choose the right train. Ou...

The firework display was interrupted when the barge carrying the fireworks caught fire, but there was a  rapid intervention by our fire service boats and nobody was injured.