11th of August Olivier had already set up the breakfast table by the pool and it smelled of fresh Croissants. Even after a good sleep in the cool room downstairs I still had this headache from the lack of hydration yesterday. So I was back to drinking a lot. At least the heat shock for the Garmin was over and it came back to life.
Olivier helped us with his garden hose to clean our bikes from all the dust they collected yesterday. We took a good bye selfie and left a bit late by 8:20. We were heading a bit further east to join the Way of Saint James from Vezelay again at Sainte-Foy-La-Grande. It’s a little fortified town by the river Dordogne, which I thought was based on a Roman city plan as we were just biking on a Roman road. But it had no Roman urban base at it was founded as one of the first Bastides by Alfons de Poitiers in 1255. (Poitiers was the place with one of the oldest existing buildings of Christianty in France, where we were 3rd of August).
It was exactly 9:30 am that we stood in front of the tourism office to be opened to get our Saint James stamp. The friendly man from the tourism office corrected my Roman interpretation, and explained it was all due to the harbour nearby and the market place as a centre square being the nucleus to the check board pattern of this fortified town.
Now we found us in the wine region of the Dordogne and it was lovely to bike in the fresh morning air. We had only 30km to go until Duras and we made it even before 11:00 to be on the hilltop with the castle. Robert had found a nice little hotel in town for two nights as he didn’t want to move any further in this heat. It was the most reasonable thing to do as temperatures were rising more and more. It didn’t even make sense to take a shower after our bike ride, because we knew once we stepped out the door we would be completely sweaty again.
By noon we had agreed to meet Hanneke Cramer. To tell a long story short: it was on one of the bike tours through the Netherlands that we discovered in a museum about the family history of Robert’s ancestors a further branch of his family tree, which was unknown to him. Via Facebook he had found a contact to a possible cousin of him.
So here we are in Duras on a market Monday, when the Dutch community meets at the Café de la Paix and we were heading towards a table with unknown people, but Robert knew immediately who was family. While he was diving into his familiar Dutch world I had a language meltdown in my brain after Swiss-German, French, English, Latin and now even Dutch. But it was fun because somehow they understood my “Fratinglishgermdutch”. There were two Hannekes. The aunt and the niece. Both with the same name. Robert was immediately at ease and it felt like they knew each other since a long time talking about their genealogy.
As the time advanced the vertical sun above our heads made people flee from the market place (sounds nearly like it had turned into a flea-market). There was still a pizza stand open, and as we had experienced how difficult it is to find some food in these little villages I ordered one to share with Robert. Having something to digest was the perfect reason to have a real Siesta. I slept like a rock for two hours. Robert couldn’t find sleep at all. He was nearly getting claustrophobic with the blinds closed to leave the heat outside, and his worries about how we would continue our project in this heatwave. It did not make him relax at all and we thought it was better to visit Hanneke at home with her family to change his ideas. I packed my laptop and my swimsuit and off we were back on our bikes for a short ride through suffocating heat.
After rolling down from Duras we had to climb up again with our bikes to find the house hidden on a hillside below a forest, nearly invisible between plants and trees. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright like sculpture in the style of the prairie line which horizontally stretched out into the landscape. Built in the 1970ies by a French architect it looked very familiar to me. Something which reminded me of Fritz Stucki, a Swiss architect who had also been to the architecture school of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We joined Hanneke and Chris who have lived in this place since more than thirty years, and their niece Hanneke with her husband Jurriaan and their daughter Carolien. At first we had something to drink by the pool, and while Robert took a swim I installed my little office inside the house behind the panoramic windows where it was a lot cooler. My journal blog needed urgent updates and I decided to join the four days of pause in Ardin into one single post from the 4th to the 7th of August to advance a bit. Nevertheless, I wasn’t done by the time Hanneke called for dinner after sunset and that’s very late this far west in France. The bats were so thirsty they even drank out of the pool while flying over it. The sound of cicadas and crickets chirred through the warm summer night after the hottest day ever recorded in Duras with 41°C.
