Thursday 1 September - leave Moissac, St Flour, Roanne and Charlieu


And then it was all over for 2011. We ran through the winterising list that Chris Farmer had left on board for us, then settled up accounts with Kaz and Iain, and bade them farewell. Then lock the wheelhouse, into the car and away!

On our trip back to Bern, we again took back roads wherever we could (probably just trying to prolong the holiday!). We headed for St Flour, where friends of Rita are thinking of buying a farm, and were impressed with the way the city clings to the edge of the precipice when viewed from below.

We then visited Roanne, since we had heard so much about the port there, and I secretly hoped that Quo Vadis might still be moored there. But Roanne was a major disappointment. The city was much larger than I expected, noisy and with lots of traffic. The signage was near non-existent (even worse than in the rest of France) and it took ages to find the port. When we did finally stumble upon it, it was not as nice as I expected from photos I had seen. It was certainly big, but it was fairly empty (I later found out that the Roanne Canal had closed due to lack of water) and had a generally seedy look about it. We then tried to find a hotel to stay in. Again the signage was of no help, so after a couple of hours we gave up and just left Roanne.

We drove north-east for a while, with a huge storm approaching from the west. Eventually, we saw a sign for a B&B on a side-road, so we went searching. We found it OK, but it was full. But the very kind lady phoned ahead to the next town and booked us the last room in one of the hotels. We reached Le Relais de l'Abbaye in Charlieu just before the storm arrived, and then had a great dinner in their outdoor restaurant (out of the rain). A nice end to a mixed day.