We still continue to enjoy lovely weather unlike the UK which is experiencing more heavy rains.  I keep hoping it will rain every night as quite often dark clouds loom early evening which will save me from watering, but alas this has not been forthcoming.

I was the only one at French yesterday as Rick is away for a month, first in England and then to Denmark to play some gigs, Swedish Dennis has found himself a summer job and Peter has Julie over and is spending quality time with her.  As it was only me, the rule is that one student is allowed just a one hour lesson.  This was spent practising my conversational French, a lot of which I seem to have forgotten over the past month since my last lesson although Valerie said I was doing fine.  I recounted the story of my birth, adoption and subsequent meeting with my “mère naturelle”.   I learnt that an older sister is called “ma soeur ainée” (I have always used “ma soeur plus agée) and a younger sister is “ma soeur cadette”.

Valerie also asked about my trip back to the UK (a visit to see my birth mum prompted the above) and we discussed my trip to Nice, Valerie agreeing that I was not so “folle” to go there from England.

I also related the story of Chris with the snake after Valerie told me that two of Peter’s dogs had been bitten by an adder in his garden.  A phone call to Peter later confirmed that the dogs had been bitten a week apart and that he had finally caught the offending snake with a pair of chop sticks (it was either that he said or a 10 inch carving knife with which to lob its head off!) and taken it to the vets to be disposed of.  Adders are protected here so he had to then take it up the mountain and release it.  Apparently there has been an article in the local paper recently warning walkers to be on the look out for “vipers”, so perhaps they are extra prevalent this year.

We woke this morning to find at least 20 hoppers suspended from the sticky tape, so it worked! 

Today the Tour finished a stage in Briançon coming all the way from Val d’Isere and up over the gruelling Col du Galibier.  We spent the day with Denise and Michel, enjoying a lovely lunch in the garden along with Lauren and Michael too.  We waited until the riders were nearing town then Denise and I went to join the men at the central roundabout in town where the race came down past the barracks, turning left at the roundabout and then having to finish the race by cyling up the very steep “Chaussée”, left round the citadel and arriving at the “Champ du Mars”.  As Denise and I could not find our husbands, we carried on up to the citadel and took a post up on the “interdit” ramparts of the old town where we watched the leader cycle past, closely followed by Nicholas Sarkozy who had been following this stage of the Tour.  We then climbed up through the Gargouille so we could see the presentations but there were so many people about, we had to make do with watching it on the large screen specially erected for the occasion.  Denise recognised several of the town’s dignitaries but was disappointed she did not get to shake Sarkozy’s hand!

Back at Denise and Michel’s, the boys were dying of thirst, having been locked out, but Chris had managed to get some great footage of the Tour as they sped past.  Watching the highlights later on TV, we were disappointed that our house had just missed out on being seen and that Chris and Michel had not been picked out in the crowd.

As usual, another thoroughly enjoyable day at Denise and Michel’s where they spoiled us with good food, drink and conversation.  Michel told us a story of a young boy from a campsite of travellers, who has gone missing down by the Lac Serre Ponçon.  They are very worried as he is an epileptic and needs to have special drugs everyday.  There is talk of abduction, especially after the Madeleine case in Portugal, but the feeling is generally that he has met with an accident.

We are under siege from the hoards of grasshoppers and have taken to sleeping in our downstairs back bedroom.  One particular type of brown hopper are crawling up our house walls and disappearing into the roof.  They are then crawling through cracks in between the wooden logs upstairs and appearing all over our mezzanine floor where we usually sleep, heading for the warmth during the evenings when it turns colder.  There is no way I can sleep there at the moment, especially after Friday night when I heard one thud onto my pillow!  There are actually less hoppers this year due to the torrential rail we experienced during June, last year’s plague being due to the drought but we never had such a problem last year with them coming into the roof.  I told Chris that if we had not been fortunate enough to have our extra bedrooms, I would have made him rent a small apartment somewhere in the valley for me to sleep in!  I’m not normally of a nervous disposition but even I draw the line at having hoppers crawling over my face in the middle of the night.  I spent the weekend strimming the slope in front of the patio and this caused a whole army of hoppers to converge on the chalet.

Today we went on a murdering spree.  We don’t like killing them but enough is enough.  Our terrace ended up looking like the killing fields after I swept them out of the eaves and Chris splattered them with a flip-flop on their arrival onto the patio. The ones caught in the house go to a watery grave down the toilet.  We discovered their route up and have covered parts of the wood with double sided tape which they walk on and then get stuck.  We think, however, that this grasshopper invasion must be an unusual phenomenon as when we moved in here this time 2 years ago, there was absolutely no evidence of their having been any in the house at all.  Plenty of dead flies but not a grasshopper in sight.  I suppose this is one disadvantage to living in the middle of an Alpine meadow!

After having caught at least 20 hoppers upstairs last night we finally went to bed after midnight.  I expected to get up this morning and find the whole of our upstairs covered but there wasn’t one in sight – how weird was that.  I suppose they crawled back when it turned colder in the middle of the night.  I was also surprised I didn’t suffer from nightmares too.

Kevin and Antoinette are here on holiday with Antoinette’s son Colin and his friend.  The youngsters are enjoying mountain biking down the mountain, white water rafting and climbing in the adventure park and costing Antoinette a small fortune.  I was invited to go climbing with them today but as they couldn’t get out of town till 6 this evening due to the Tour de France bike ride coming through tomorrow, I postponed it until next week after the boys have returned home, leaving Antoinette and Kevin a week to themselves.  We spent some of the weekend following the Tour live on the television and it’s getting quite exciting as it nears the Serre Chevalier.