Doing it NOW Chris and Yogi out seeing the best bits of the world while they still can....Doing it NOW

Well we are finally here in Normandy at the little cottage (14th May), or as the locals call it, La Chateau or Petite Maison. It is everything we thought it would be, peaceful and quiet, surrounded by fields and a few farm houses.
The village of Fontenay has what looks to be about 20 houses and 1 shop that sells everything and doubles as a restaurant and bar, but is only open at odd times. No one speaks English around here, so we are surviving on a combination of the odd french word and pen and paper and if that fails just point and grunt.

We arrived late in the day so quickly raced into the nearest town, St Hiliare du Harcourt, about 7km away, this is a reasonable size town and has everything we need. We found a supermarket and loaded up on food and of course wine, red wine for $1.25 Aussie a bottle and it tastes great, cans of beer for 32 cents Aussie!!!!
We bought great bread, pate and of course more cheese. Duck confeit, veggies, fruit and beautiful tasting yoghurt, so much variety in the shops, they obviously don't have to deal with a monopoly like we do with coles or woolworths dictating what brands we can buy.

The French enjoy an aperitif before meals and the standard drink is called Kir, it is a dash of blackberry liqueur with white wine, so we bought some and make our own, very civilised these French. We also bought some red martini just for a change. And of course if you have an aperitif before dinner then you must have a digestive after dinner so we bought some Calvados brandy which is one of the many gourmet items the region of Normandy is famous for.
The cottage was a little cold so we fired up the gas heater and enjoyed a pizza we also bought on the way home. With the aperitifs, pizza and digestives we were well on the way!!!!

The next day was spent exploring St Hiliare du Harcourt and a few small villages along the way, every 2km or so there is a small village, maybe a church and 10 or so houses. St Hiliare was a Norman town established in 911 yes that is 911AD not 1911!!! it has some battlements and a large church/monastery, it was also partly destroyed in 1944 when the Americans and Germans were fighting in the area. The Germans tried to counter attack the Americans who had been holed up for a few weeks but the attack was beaten and the Americans broke out and beat the Germans and as they say the rest is history.
I find a lot of the local WW2 history fascinating and plan to visit a lot of the museums in the area that tell the story of June 1944.
We drove to Mortain another small town 10km away which is built on the side of a very high hill with cliffs, I don't think there was a flat road in the place.
On to Vire, a big town and the attraction was a large artisan market, it turns out the artisan market was more like what we call a trash and treasure, it was huge most of the towns main streets were blocked of for the 200 stalls.
Vire is at the top of a large valley and is very picturesque. The train to Paris stops here (2.5 hours to Paris).

Yogi's driving is getting more confident each day and we have very little trouble negotiating the country towns and roads, the urge to go the wrong way around a roundabout is still hard to overcome.
Today (17th May) is make and mend, into town to do the laundry, buy some groceries and home to clean the cottage, today was beautiful weather; to quote a favourite album title of mine "no jackets required", can anyone guess who? when we got back to the cottage it was too nice to be inside cleaning so we sat in the sun and had a beer or two, what a pleasant way to end the day.
Plan for tomorrow is to go to Mont St Michel, an abbey fortress set on the bay of Mont St Michel, apparently it is the most visited site after the Eiffel tower, and it's only 30mins drive away.....tell you all about it next time.