France - Collecting and Shade Seeking

When we first arrived in France the weather was scorching, so a lot of our outside play was done early in the morning or late in the day. When the weather is that hot you try to stay in the shade for the hottest part of the day, unfortunately Fred doesn't tend to stay where you put him so sometimes we had to find shady places

to go where we could still be outside

Like these beautiful, but compact woods just up the lane from Granny's house. See,

I can find a wood anywhere!

 There is of course an ulterior motive for going to the woods, isn't there always!

They are full of the biggest pine cones I have ever seen. I'm sure there are massive pine cones like these all over the place in other parts of the world but in Devon, we only seem to get titchy little things. Unfortunately due to our tight luggage restriction we can't bring them back with us this time, but the boys had a whole week of playing with them, and they may find their way back to Blighty in someone else's luggage at some point.

Even the evenings were sweltering for the first few days we were there. The boys waited until late in the day to go down to pick cherries, and you can see how late it was by their long shadows, but it was still unbelievably hot.

The weather broke in spectacular fashion on the Wednesday and was just pleasantly warm and manageably showery for the rest of the week. The showers suited us very well though as it meant the markets weren't as crowded, and rain doesn't bother us! We're British!