The spring in our midst

Here we are, already nine days into April and I've been remiss once more in blogging, but I'm sure you will all understand when I say the weather has been so beautiful we've been outside as much as humanly possible. As I mentioned in my previous post, we went down to the Haute-Marne again at the end of March, mainly to keep an appointment with the electricity company. We were blessed with gorgeous weather for all but one of the twelve days we were there. Some of you who 'see' me on Facebook will already be familiar with a few of the photos below and you'll notice that there's only one with overcast skies. That was the day my daughter and I climbed to the top of the Marne Valley and looked down into the village of Vignory below. Believe me when I say the view was breathtaking and my phone photo does it no justice at all. 

The other photos were taken in both our village and also in Joinville, where we unfortunately spent most of the time after my last post at the garage. This interruption to our planned jobs was due to a persistent problem with one of the sensors in the car that was causing it to misfire and misbehave horribly. Luckily, we found the wonderful Garage Guyot in Joinville who went above and beyond anything we could have expected to help us. They were quite magnificent and after two days, they'd replaced the troublesome sensor, treated the car to a set of new spark plugs and replaced two of the 'bobines' over said spark plugs. The car is now running well, thankfully. In between times, though, we did manage to stroll through Joinville's pretty historic quarters up on the hill and I snapped some of its delightful houses and side streets. 

I've written about its background before, but for those who may not have seen the first post I wrote about Joinville, here's a link that tells you all about it. It's in Dutch, but Google does an excellent English translation of the text.

Joinville's market square

One of Joinville's gorgeous side streets

My favourite house in the town. Not ours!

Another pretty side street

View over Vignory

Leaving our village

A view from the garden
(much in need of attention)

Bee seeking nectar in a dandelion

Looking down into the village

Fruit trees in a paddock nearby

And then it was time to come home after all the drama with the car and enjoy the peaceful tranquillity of our Zeeland view. I know I've also posted photos of it before, but the forsythia is just going on and on and is more beautiful than I've ever seen it.

A tub of primulas. I'm amazed they survived
during our absence. It's been so dry!

My ivy hedge is exploding!
Time to get the trimmer out

I'm now very busy with another course. It's a short one, but there are 200 students and there's a lot of marking and feedback to give. Fortunately, the three main assignments they have to complete are also short, so I'm trying to do about 60 a day to keep up. The sun is still shining, though, so tomorrow I'm going to make time to clean Vereeniging again, as the dust has been flying while we've been away and she's looking somewhat shabby as a result.

Enjoy the rest of the week allemaal and I'll be back again soon!