The purpose of our stay in St Martin was to relax and decompress after the ‘Tour De France’, similar to the last stage into Paris where the winner shares a bottle of champagne with his team mates whilst riding their bikes. Well, we neither rode bikes or shared a bottle of champagne, though I managed to have a couple of beers during the weekend.

We had stayed in St Martin De Re and in our hotel, La Baronnie before. It’s a lovely, luxurious hotel and does a fab breakfast. The town is small, though the harbour area is both interesting and lively. There didn’t appear to be a huge amount of tourists and we had two delicious meals, in O Parloir, a quirky restaurant with pop art decor and Baline Bleu, which is a more traditional portside eating place. Our first night in the hotel was unfortunately disturbed by some Irish guests, making a row and unloading boxes from a car at 4:30 in the morning. No, we didn’t know why either.

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We wandered around the town, looking in some of the tourist shops, stocked with nautically themed items and those horizontally striped T shirts, designed to accentuate the two kilos you’ve gained in Michelin starred restaurants. The harbour is pleasant to sit beside so we had coffee and just people watched.

We left on Monday morning and drove up the boring D road to join the autoroute for home. Unfortunately Charles, our sat nav voice, had a minor embolism near Angers and directed us through the city center. He had done this once before, so I should have ignored him and continued on to Nantes, but his voice is so persuasive I decided not to. Besides, who then would have brought me the mid morning G&T? What it did do was to convince us that Angers was worthy of a visit rather than an unfortunate wrong turn.

So, we arrived home mid afternoon, somewhat weary but pleased to see our animal crew again. We’ve discovered places we want to return to and others which we feel we’ve ticked off our list. France has many more corners to discover… a bientot!!