Garage door

So, after fifteen years, we decided to replace the old garage door. It was a manual folding door. And lately it has been more and more difficult to open and close. It was time. The new door is an automatic overhead door. Easily operated with the push of a button. Just like we always had back in the USA.

The new garage door. It's automatic and opens with a push of a button. It looks nice, and cleaner.

I was worried, at first, that getting a white door would not be in keeping with how the house looked. But now I'm convinced that the white door works even better. Our house is not, after all, an old historical kind of place. It's modern, and modern improvements are not out of place.

The old door had four panels that had to be opened manually, and lately they've been sticking. Now they're gone.

We also have new shutters on the back (western) side of the house. I'll post about them soon. They're white as well, and they're solar powered. That means that we can push a button inside to close and open them without having to open the windows. Oh, such modernity!

Market hall

Next to the donjon in Niort is the central market hall, les halles de Niort. The current building dates from 1869 and was built in the Baltard tradition. He was the guy that designed the now defunct market halls in central Paris. Lots of iron and glass, typical of the time.

Coming up from the river toward the market hall, which sits up on the Place du donjon.

The market in Niort is open six days a week, but not all the stalls are open all the time. I read that Thursdays and Saturdays are the big days when most vendors are open and other merchants set up their stands on the plaza outside the market hall. We were there on a Friday. Dogs aren't allowed inside, so I stayed out with Tasha while Ken had a look.

Le donjon de Niort

As an American and English speaker, I grew up thinking that a dungeon was a dark, underground cell where prisoners were kept and tortured. It's true that in the anglophone world, the word has evolved. In French, un donjon is what the English call the "keep," the strong, central structure of a castle or fortress. In many medieval ruins, the donjon is often what's left standing and what we see when we visit them.

The river side of the donjon, seen from the parking lot on the river.

So it is with the donjon at Niort, which dates from the thirteenth century. It was part of a much larger fortress, long destroyed and dismantled, on the banks of the Sèvre Niortaise. We parked our car right across the river from the donjon, which is in the center of the old city, right next to the central market hall and not far from city hall.

The city side of the old donjon. It was a museum for a while, and now it serves as an exhibition space.

As usual, having the dog with us meant that we wouldn't see the interior, but that's ok. Walking around the outside was good enough. We've both been inside donjons before and I'm sure we didn't miss much.

Niort

The city of Niort (pop. about 60,000) is the capital of the Deux-Sèvres department, and is just over the border from the Vendée where we stayed. Without really knowing anything about it except the name, we decided to drive over and walk around on Friday morning. We followed the signs toward the centre-ville (downtown) and parked in a lot on a small island in the Sèvre Niortaise, the river that flows through the middle of town.

A view of the Sèvre Niortaise in the middle of Niort.

As with many of the rivers in this relatively flat region, the water flowed very slowly, allowing lots of lilies and duckweed and who-knows-what-else to grow on the river's surface. The day was overcast and a little chilly, but there was no wind and walking was pleasant. I hooked Tasha's leash to my waist and we headed in.

Dying to get in

This is the entrance to a cemetery in the small town across the Vendée river from the house we rented. We took a short walk around the neighborhood and it was very quiet, except for a few people doing landscape maintenance in the cemetery.

It's interesting how the cross is made from the gate's middle picket.

We arrived at the gîte (rental house) on a Saturday, went to La Rochelle the following Monday, and to the island of Noirmoutier on the Wednesday after that. Tuesday and Thursday we spent closer to home. On Friday, we drove over to the city of Niort for a walk around before coming back home to Saint-Aignan on Saturday, three weeks ago now. I'll start posting my photos of Niort tomorrow.

Bye-bye beach

This is that beach in the video with Tasha that I posted the other day. After our little walk, we got back into the car and headed back to the mainland. We planned our return so that we would go south a little down the coast before turning back east and inland to our rental house. This took us through several rather large beach resort towns, including Saint-Jean-de-Monts, Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, and Les Sables-d'Olonne.

A sailboat moored off the Saint-Jean beach on Noirmoutier island.

We really just passed through each one, stopping once for Ken to take a few photos. We were both impressed with the size of these places. Big wide beaches (and some surfers!) lined with wide promenades, boulevards, and mid-rise hotels and condominiums. And, since it was a week of school vacation and the weather was pretty good, they were crowded with people walking, shopping, and sitting in sidewalk cafés along the beach.

Some variety of yucca plant (I'm guessing) in bloom on the sand dune above the beach.

We also got caught up in some traffic, exacerbated by road construction here and there. But none of that lasted too long, and before we knew it we were closing in on our temporary home away from home after a long and successful day trip.

Salt shack, baby

The Atlantic coast of France is known, at least in France, for its marais salants (salt ponds). As far as I know, these are not large commercial operations, but small artisinal businesses where salt is harvested the old-fashioned way, by hand. Perhaps the most famous salt product from the region is fleur de sel, the fine top-most layer of salt crystals harvested from a pond, which is now marketed as a luxury product around the world. The most famous salt-producing area in the region is Guérande (north of where we were in October), and sel de Guérande is quite sought-after in France.

Salt ponds outside of the town of Noirmoutier-en-l'Isle (in the background).

I really can't tell one batch of salt from another, so I'm not necessarily attracted to sel de Guérande nor am I willing to pay the prices for fleur de sel. But I do see stories and documentaries about artisinal salt production on television and can appreciate what goes into it and why it's important to support those who do it. There are, of course, much larger industrial salt operations on the Mediterranean coast of France, but not here.

A salt shack, where salt is for sale. At this one, we saw a small trail peppered (get it?) with interpretive signs that explain salt production. Obviously, a tourist stop.

So, naturally, when we drove by one of the local salt ponds on the island of Noirmoutier, I wanted to stop for photos. The stand was closed when we stopped (scheduled to open later in the afternoon), but that was better for photos. We saw the typical rectilinear evaporation ponds with their little piles of harvested salt drying in the sun. The salt is gathered by hand, using a long-handled wooden tool to scrape it from the evaporating basin into piles for drying.