Get Smart!

A rather sticky day. However we set out manfully to try to nail the PCR test. Off to Monteux to beard them in their lair…the laboratoire that is. Online reservations are so labyrinthine, asking for information we either don’t know or don’t have.

Red letterbox!

I had the location on ipad with map and sort of knew where it would be, but when we got to Monteux there were vast roadworks and signs to the laboratoire that seemed to go round in circles. I enquired at the pharmacie and was directed and eventually we picked our way through excavated pavement and gravel to the correct doors. Once there we learned that an appointment was not necessary - just turn up. Good, that means we can zoom there at 7 am on day of departure and come back to close up the house. Not so fast…the fly in the proverbial is that they don’t email the result but send it to the smartphone where you have to download the QR code. Hell! How do you read it? I hope they will allow us to have the same phone number. Goes to show that life is increasingly becoming impossible without the blessed things even if most of the time they are never switched on. Then what? And by the time we get the message we’ll be halfway to Amboise - bit far to return if we have to quarantine.

Somewhat hot and bothered we searched for a coffee and ended up in Violès at the Brasserie du Cours. Coffee indifferent but surroundings delightful under the canopy of vines. Delicious cooking smells wafting out from the kitchen. Adrian said he could probably manage the set menu - 15 euros three courses with glass of wine - so we reserved a table and went for a walk round the streets until midday. 

Violès is a workaday village somewhat in need of a by pass as heavy lorries thunder through part of it. But away from the main road it is interesting with a little canal swarming with damsel and dragonflies, old olive mill, good butcher and baker, etc. Sadly though there seems to have been a pogrom against plane trees and the streets are dotted with severed stumps of what were venerable trees. 

Next task is to book and pay for the two day after arrival test to be delivered to one’s home.More expense…I’d rather quarantine🤗