At home in Nantes.

Yesterday Liz & I went on a very long trip to get a staircase.....to Nantes, about 100 kilometers west of here. We hired a truck from the truly ugly Super U and set off on what should have been quite a short expedition...little did we know it would take hours of trial & error to actually get the "Escalier".

At first they only had half of it in Nantes & the other half was another hours drive away. Then they (I wont mention any names here "Lapeyre") decided they would bring the other half to the shop in Nantes if we could come back in the afternoon. We decided we would have a little lunch in the mean time...& try & find a shop that I've been wanting to go to for years called "La Droguerie". They sell ribbons, buttons & wool. It was heaven. I bought 8 metres of braid. The most beautiful stuff. I could have spent hours in there. They had the most beautiful baby clothes to knit in brilliant colours and hanks of wool, cashmere, silk & cotton all hanging in rainbows one above the other against dark wooden panelled walls.

We were both pleasantly surprised by Nantes. First & foremost it has a spectacular tramways system, the largest tramway network in France, I felt right at home, it was just like Melbourne....in fact the first ever organized public transport system began in Nantes in 1879.

I wasn't so used to blue double decker buses though.

After our little sojourn we went back to see if the staircase had arrived but somehow somebody else had taken our staircase & left us with theirs, which was the wrong size (eternally grateful that we discovered this before we left for the long drive home). So... to fill in some more time while we waited we went to a huge hardware store & bought plasterboard & various bits & pieces in an extremely anarchic French way, where there was no queue and the time was getting shorter & shorter until the Lapeyre shop closed.

Fnally we got the stairs & headed for home over this bridge over the Loire. You can see a HUGE wood yard here that went for acres & acres. Richard would have been in heaven.
Finally after a short detour where we went awry because we were yacking too much, we arrived home for dinner & a quick game of Yarnuff before we went to bed.