Summer at last

I'm back! The past few months have been so hectic with lots of work activity and I'm afraid I neglected the task of keeping the French Country journal up-to-date.

In addition there has been the need for big decisions on the future of the journal following Google's announcement to stop the service we use to upload information. The service would end in April, Google informed us. That left us adrift, trying to decide which service to use, most of the votes going for a sharp learning curve with WordPress. However, at the last moment Google announced they were releasing new software that would allow us, and the hundreds of thousands of others who used their service, to migrate to a new Google server.

So over the last few weeks we have been spending time moving files and data to the new location. Not that you will notice - we have worked hard to ensure this is seamless on all our websites.

But enough of technicalities, this is French Country, the purpose of which is to keep you up-to-date with what's happening in this part of the south of France, not bore you with techno-speak.

To start, you need to know this has been a long, dark and wet winter, very untypical. I don't bore with details except to say that I'm really pleased we have see the last of the winter weather. We sort of missed spring, even though we had daffodils, snowdrops and all other spring flowers, but it still seemed like winter. But then, summer arrived. Very suddenly it was here. Three weeks ago, in what should still have been spring, we started with really good summer weather.

This week in particular has started exceptionally well, with afternoon temperatures at 27/28 degrees. The pools have regained their life (my husband David dived in yesterday for the first time this year - and said it was beautiful).

So today we had an afternoon off from office work and went down to the coast. We went to Cap d'Agde, simply to get away from the office for a few hours, enjoy a simple lunch in one of the restaurants on the promenade, and then a long walk.

We walked down to the old port - the Capitanerie, to get some real sea air. We went through the boatyard and down the pathway alongside the apartments opposite the "'Ile des Pêcheurs". Here, every apartment owner appears to have a boat or yacht, moored alongside their apartment. That's the promenade at the top of this article.

Arriving at the port, it was good just to be there. There were just a few people on the beach "Grande Conque", relaxing and like us, taking in the sea air (that's the beach below). The Grande Conque is a small beach close to an old volcano (very old, around 750,000 years ago - this isn't Iceland). However, the beach is good, and this is perhaps the best time of the year to take the sun safely - and it's much better than a really crowded beach.

Then, unwilling to leave, it's back home to catch up with what we had missed in the office, but yes, very happy that summer is here.