Back in the box files

I spent the morning catching up with a friend, a long overdue meet-up. Then an afternoon at home, partly because the intermittent gut troubles I've been having for a while (no details, I promise) flared up again. I'm hoping for some insight when I finally get to see a GP later in the month.
Anyway, it wasn't a day for outdoor photography. So by way of therapeutic distraction, I dug out some old negatives. Partly, I wanted to go back over the procedure for digitising them and creating mono images in-camera.  This is a feature of my Nikon that I really like. I haven't done this for a while, and it was good to revisit the details.
I was also curious about this particular set, taken on holiday in France with 3 women friends, sometime in the mid-1970s.  The negatives are very battered, clearly I didn't store them well; this is particularly obvious on the extra.
The negatives did bring back two nice memories, still visible through the scratches. One, the  improbable achievement of fitting 4 adults, plus luggage and camping gear,  into a Renault 4. What a car! A trooper, so much more robust than its diminutive size suggests. . We drove through the south of England, got the ferry, and then drove all the way down to SW France.  Much exploration in the Pyrenees followed, testing the Renault 4 to its limits. On some very steep ascents, some of us got out and walked :-)
The other memory (extra) is the stop we made in the Auvergne, on the way South. Through friends-of-friends' contacts - perhaps a penpal, or a fellow student? - we stayed overnight at a small village, and visited a farming family and their small dairy. I was fascinated by the machinery and the cheese presses, and the careful teamwork on show.  Much later, when I read John Berger's books about rural life in similar areas, and saw Jean Mohr's wonderful images, those brief glimpses came back to me again.