Boules and maps

Saturday morning in the little village of St Vérain. I hear shouts while still some way off and wonder what's going on. It's a boules tournament. 

Everyone's there, outside the church. People of all ages including lots of youth clacking their boules together in a macho way. 

St Vérain is towards the bottom of this 1:100,000 map. These are great maps with good colours and perfect for planning - the GR is the dashed red line. 

But not quite detailed enough for each day's walking. For that I use 1:25,000 maps, downloaded onto my phone for just 15 euros a year for all of France. Not bad! Here's the detail, after zooming in, near Bitry, to the north-east of St Vérain in the map above. 

The extra detail allows all sorts of off-piste excursions from the GR. I took a lovely farm track from Bitry, the solid black line running down to the bottom left corner. These excursions usually work well but this time it was boots off and wading a stream swollen by overnight rain. The water was over my knees!

Finally, here is a map from an information board at the side of the Loire that shows the ground covered in the last couple of weeks. Vendôme and then Blois to the top left, across the forests of the Sologne to Gien, Briare with its pont-canal, and lastly, via the woods on right, to Cosne sur Loire.