Day 22 - to the Abbey again

The day got off to a slower start than we had intended, we have moved into Saulieu for a couple of days, as the lovely chateau by the lake was full up for the weekend; fortunately we had been able to leave the horses there so I had to get up earlier to feed the them. It was just starting to rain as I left, but as usual the horses were pleased to see me. But Flurry was in for a shock, he's been misbehaving again, spooking at things that wouldn't normally worry him, so his rations have been reduced to one feed in the evening, he was not impressed! When I got back to the hotel Martine was still in her pyjamas, she had been researching the flies that are sticking under the horses' tails and time had got away from her. So after an uninspired breakfast, we went back to the horses and got tacked up in the rain. Martine decided not to bring her camera, so I'm afraid the photos are not up to the usual standard. Especially as I think there was a bit of Carambar stuck to the lens.
We finally decided Gigi's front left boot had seen better days, and so I put our spare on her, and off we went!

It was a very grey morning, even the dandelions had decided not to bother opening up.

But then the sun came out and things looked a lot better.

Then we came upon this sign telling people not to light fires here.......

And maybe you can see the smoke in the distance, but that was some fishermen lighting a log fire to cook their catch. Ah the French, laws are to be interpreted not necessarily followed !

Finally we arrived at the Abbey we had visited before, L'Abbaye de Pierre qui Vire, but from the other direction.

After leaving the Abbey we came on a field with 3 young flighty ponies, Gigi was very interested in them, I think she must be coming into season, and when they started to canter towards us, Gigi decided to turn around and join them, well I quickly whipped her back in the right direction, but she decided to keep cantering anyway. Flurry, who was in front, maybe thought, if  Gigi is scared, so should I be, and took off at a canter as well. After a bit of a scurry we got them both under control... a bit of excitement is good...right?

Part of our journey was on the Saint-Jacques de Compostelle (Santiago de Compostela in Spanish) which is marked by this little sunshine sign

After the Abbey we trotted through some fairly soggy grass, and Flurry managed to trash one of his front boots, so Martine took the other one off, and we would see if we could fix it later.

Lunchtime and we had covered around 20k! The horses were turned out same as yesterday and Martine set about fixing Flurry's boot, but managed to drop one of the small adjusting screws in the process, but we had Gigi's abandoned boot from this morning, which now turned into a source for spares!

The afternoon started off really wet, we had a target of just 10k, to give us a manageable hack tomorrow to reach our 50k and most of it was done in the pouring rain, the only highlight was two small deer, who took off as soon as they saw us.

So we just plodded on, the sun came out and we reached our target for today.

To the abbey again at EveryTrail
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