Merry - Dormes

Merry-sur-Yonne

Monday 31st July

After a restful morning, it was looking as though we may get some rain, but it brightened up a lot after lunch and we went for a walk that took us up on top of the rocks, through some woods (it was getting much hotter again by this time, so the shade was welcome) and back to Merry beside the canal. 

 From the top of the cliffs where we had superb views over the river, the village and our campste.
 
 

Of course we were following a geo trail.  A couple of the caches were right up John's street - it took an engineer to work out how to open them!  The first one was a pipe with slots cut through it, so it needed to be twisted in alternate directions to extract the pot poked inside.


The second was a u-bend pipe screwed to a tree.  Looking down into the open top, we could see the little pot inside, but how do you get it out?  It didn't take John long to work out that one hand covering the open bottom and blowing into the top of the left-hand pipe, caused the little pot to fly out of the top of the right-hand pipe!! Success!

It seemed that the weather forecast for this area over the last 2 days was not terribly accurate as the storms hadn't materialised.  All that changed about 11pm when we were getting ready for bed.  There were some rumblings and flashings and then all hell let loose - it sounded like golf balls were being thrown at the van from all angles!  That changed to very heavy rain and deafening thunder claps.  So sleep was delayed for a while ....

Tuesday 1st August

.... but at 6.30 this morning back it all came again, with the rain and rumbling continuing till we left Merry about 9.30.  Talking to our neighbours before we left, they told us they needed to get their awning in when it all started last night, and they said the lumps of ice really were huge.  Fortunately they don't seem to have done any damage.

We travelled south today on minor roads, to the village of Dornes, between Nevers and Moulins.
 
 We were heading for a France Passion, but came across this small municipal campsite beside a fishing lake and decided to stop here for the night.