We have seen a lot of things in our days on the Ile. Motor homes galore! One even towing a horse float, and one caravan behind a tractor. Tractors of some variety basically everywhere on any road you can imagine, often with many other road users behind him.
Today we spotted more bunnies; a pheasant, cormoran, egrets and the usual variety of geese, chickens, white swans, ducks, falcons, buzzards and other smaller birds.
The villages are surrounded by fields of grapes and vegetables of a great variety, then all the salt pans, which are magnificently engineered by allowing water from the Atlantic to come into the maze of the pans, and ultimately returned to the ocean by an outgoing ditch, opened at low tide.
We explored the last mentioned today when we found the Ecomuseum of the salt pans on the way to Loix. We rocked up at opening time after lunch shortly followed by a bus of teenagers come for a " week of education "! Despite all the rapid french we were able to follow most of it. Had a look around the different pans and their stage in the production cycle.
The amazing engineering relies solely on the height of the tides to regulate the inflow and outflow'
The system produces 59 kg of salt every two days per final pad which are the shallow little concrete pads where the amount of salt measures 30 grams per litre of sea water
This shows the final stages of the evaporation maze
Via the super market at Ars, we headed home. The day warmed up beautifully and there was hardly any wind, which was awesome.
Monsieur was trimming the vines after the harvest
We headed to the Phare and decided to have dinner again at Chez Marie, which had Mussels and Fries for Guy and the usual amazing crepe for Caroline followed by desserts.
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