Back online

The shops in our local town are closed on Mondays, so we decided to take the 45 minute drive down to Figeac to see if we could buy a new modem.  I had phoned Orange (France Telecom) first thing and they had given me a code to facilitate an exchange of the old modem for a new one.  We had a picnic on the way.  We had taken boiled eggs, sliced beetroot, ham, couscous with herbs and lemon and lots of other nice things.  Definitely not finger food.  So, we set up our little picnic table and got out our chairs.  We took out all the food out of the chiller box and sat down to eat.  No cutlery!  Now we are veteran picnickers, so we have no idea how this could have happened.  But, needs must and with judicious use of different sized Tupperware lids, we managed to shovel the food where it needed to go!  We had coffee in one of the old squares in Figeac and climbed up to the church to get this shot of the town.  The Orange shop opened at 2pm and we arrived at five minutes past to join a huge queue.  The people in front of us were variously concerned with buying new mobile contracts, querying their bill or taking out new TV and Internet packages, so the transactions were slow.  It took 45 minutes to get served by a quite fierce looking manager.  He took the fried modem from our sticky grasp, quickly brought our account up on screen, clicked and scanned bar codes and tapped away on his keyboard, before disappearing into the back of the shop and returning with a big grin and a shiny new all boxed-up modem free of charge.  Back home, five minutes did the installation and we were up and running again.