Well we’re not on Distant Drum, we’re on a road trip down through France en route to Andorra for a bit of a break. Clive planning the winters work on DD ready for next year – we’re thinking to head to the Ostend at Anchor Festival in May and just keep going… watch this space.

Back to today and we have arrived at our second destination, a gorgeous chateau called La Sicorie where we plan to stop a couple of days, catching up with an old friend Luke for lunch tomorrow and to see his music studio in Saint Germaine le Guillaume. The last two days we were in Bernay staying at the lovely La Ferme en Ville, and yesterday we visited the amazing Chateau Du Champ De Bataille, which has been incredibly renovated by the architect Jacques Garcia – he used to visit it as a child and bought it in a wrecked state in 1992. He has since renovated the chateau, the surrounding buildings and the 41 hectares of grounds, and it is said to now rival Versailles. We started in the gardens and just loved them. Here are some photos…..

We walked 5 Km! More later….