Lunch in Saint-Sulpice

Lisa and Margaret.

The weekend after our trip to Tours, one of our colleagues, Margaret, invited us to her house for lunch. Margaret is a recently divorced British woman with two young daughters and she lives in Saint-Sulpice, a little town north of Rennes. Since the bus service there is rather spotty on weekends, she kindly came to our house to pick us up.

Charlotte, who not only knows fashion
rules but also enjoys playing in puddles.

Lunch was lovely. Lisa got to play with a cat, I got to play her piano, we heard a mix of French and English (Margaret spoke English, her girls spoke mostly French), and we learned, thanks to her oldest daughter, that it's something of a fashion rule in France that you can't wear more than two colors at once. No wonder everyone knows we're not French before we even open our mouths!

On our afternoon walk we avoided
being trampled by a horse.

After lunch, we went for a short walk in a large forest not far from their house. It was a sunny day, but cool, and we didn't walk far or long. I'm sure the forest would be much more pleasant now that spring has come to Brittany and plants are in bloom! Before leaving, Margaret loaned us some books and some classical CDs, which was very kind of her. On the way home, we stopped off at a ruined medieval abbey in Saint-Sulpice. It wasn't as impressive as Tintern Abbey, naturally, but it was a nice way to cap a lovely Sunday afternoon.

Part of the abbey.

The abbey ruins.