Bon Jour

We landed at the single strip airport in Poitiers at 16h30 on Saturday afternoon. The airport is tiny, literally opens and closes according to the flight schedules!
We had hired a car and to Kirstin's delight it was a Toyota Verso WITH the extra seats in the back. We got Molly out and plugged in our destination "Chenon" and discovered that before we even began to tackle driving on the wrong side of the road we had to figure out how to start the car without a key, finally figured out that you have to push the clutch in and then push the button that says 'start engine'.
Anyhoooo...off we went and Malcolm soon disregarded Molly's gentle direction to turning in 100m and turned in 10m and she started recalculating...but then I saw what looked like a mall and we needed groceries so we carried on ignoring Molly and made our way over to see if it had a grocery store. The first good sign was an advert for specials on the door to the mall, and then the beautiful sight of a family unpacking groceries into the boot of the car! Yay! Food. The grocery store - Auchan was enormous, I think I would have preferred a small store, less confusion! We managed to fill a trolley with what we felt would be needed for a week and only after paying considered the fact that we had no space in the boot...oops. Somehow we managed to get everything into the car and this time followed Molly's instruction and found our way to the cottage. We arrived at 20h30 and the evening was so marvelous we decided to light a fire and have a bbq. I got to work on salads, the kids headed straight for the boat and before long we were all sitting at the long dining room table enjoying our first meal in France.