St Valentine

No time for romance this morning as I had to go around to the President's with the photos for the competition before we went off to the Auvergne. Still, we thought we would leave the motorway and have a nice lunch somewhere in a quaint village to make up for it. We started looking at 12.30pm and an hour and a quarter later we still hadn't found anywhere. If a restaurant was actually open it was full so we came back to where we'd left the motorway and ended up at a service station. It was ghastly! Escoffier would be turning in his grave. Gone are the days when you can just leave things to chance; from here on it we'll need to do some forward planning. You'll be fed up with this same old story but if I keep repeating it, some day we will really get ourselves organised. We managed to stay calm, maybe the chocolate bar helped, and enjoyed the scenery. I just marvelled at the giant icicles that had formed on the slopes.
Found the B&B which was a pretty stone house in a hamlet, thanks to Tom-Tom, dropped off our bags and went into Murat for a cup of tea. It's a pity that the French haven't caught on the the kettle in the room idea. The town was dead but the salon de thé was full of charm anddone out like a sitting room. The tea came with a triple egg timer as different teas need to infuse for different lengths of time; Darjeeling for example needs 3 minutes and they say that the English are obsessional about tea!
Once back we cracked open a bottle of champagne to finally celebrate St Valente's. That evening we ate in the B&B along with our hosts , another couple and their children. It was plain honest food served in gernerous quantities and we all hit it off which is always a blessing!