Day 38 - où est toute l'eau? 🤔
Where is all the water? 🤔
We were in a Google Maps pixelated area 😮, we were in a 'NO FLY' zone 😯, we might have to wear tin foil on our heads to stop the radio waves getting us from all the 'secret' radio towers 😱
"Lets go to this national park. Its suppose to be full of wildlife...just LOOK at all that water!"
The Parc naturel régional de la Brenne has only been a national park since 1989. Originally, back in the 12th century it was an infertile marshy area. Not knowing what to grow there, the local monks decided to 'imprision' the water and create long strings of ponds then try and cultivate the land between and around the ponds. The area became a rich farming and livestock area. Hunting was very popular untill modern times and then people wanted to put a stop to any development in the area, try and keep it like it was, encourage wildlife and make it into a park.... ( or did they 🤔)
This resulted in lots of things thriving across the area. Birds, small mammals, exotic species of plants and over a dozen different species of trees. Consequently, or maybe deliberately by farmers or conservationists over the years, most of the ponds now have trees growing around them and almost all the roads thru the area are tree lined. Not much use if you want to look at anything 🤔. But, lets give it a try so off we went.
The roads are narrow, you cant see much, there is hardley any traffic, its all very still and calm. We had programmed a route into the satnav ,thru the middle with various villages as waypoints and I was following it on my phone, trying to find a parking place or layby but I wasn't having much luck. Time to switch to the IGNrando software, the French equivalent of our OS (Ordinance Survey) maps.
"Found a road with a couple of bird hide type observatory's on it, turn down here,"
"This is a very straight road, ooo look 😯"
(Now, as you will see, we have had to crib photos from the Google street car on maps as..... we were being watched ! 🥸)
'Interdites de photographies' .... Prohibited Photograph's 😯
The trees alongside the road disappeared, replaced by lines of fences and barbed wire like the scene from The Great Escape with Steve McQueen on his motorbike (this pic is from 13 years ago on Street Maps, another line of fencing has been added in the middle since)
We quickley sped past the secret, in plain sight, radio installation and got to our carpark to walk to the 'hides' in the midday sun. One was shut because of something in French that we roughly translated to baby somethings in the area, but the other was open.
Jill watched for ducks and things while I tried to video and photograph big red dragon flies skimming across the water but I failed. 😞
We drove around to two other observation places but both were shut for one reason or another so we decided to call it a day and head north out of the park, back into farm land and our CCP site for the night at Céré-la- Ronda. We got one last glance at some water but again no parking and we were introduced, in theory, to one of the other residents of the area.
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