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07:28 Out of bed.
09:05 Finished breakfast1. Now at the computer. Renewed some vanity domains.
10;48 Finished a fruitful text chat with Three.ie staffer Hansini on the finer points of roaming.
12:19 Blog post up. Back to my room for a bit and then out.2
It’s been great to have a couple of days to rest and regroup in Cherbourg before hitting the road again. There are always a few niggly things that need sorting out; among them were getting my mobile roaming package properly configured3, feeling confident that I’m learning enough French to get by4, stocking up on provisions for the next leg of the trip and deciding the route of that next leg!
I’ve decided to move away from the coast, thus skipping the historical beaches of the Normandy D-day landings and instead head south - probably for a week - and then east. I plan to visit Briquebeque for some very prosaic reasons: it’s due south of here, which brings me away from the coast and gets me moving down the Contentin peninsula. It’s away from major roads so it’ll be a rural backwater. It’s a town of only four thousand inhabitants so it’ll be interesting to see how easy it is to find provisions in a place like that. For example, I don’t yet know the minimum town size necessary to stock up on gas cylinders.5 A hot bowl of morning porridge makes a host of indignities bearable!
12:51 Heading out to Lidl again!6
15:05:35
15:19 Shopping and browsing in Carrefour: €30
15:43 Picnic done - very delicious. (a third of a rustic baton, a giant scallion, cheese and pret-a-manger rocket leaves.) It’s cold and windy and a shower beckons so I’m going to try to find a café to chill out with a book and get warm.
15:51 Sitting down to a little pot of Lipton’s for €3.10. I’m going to make that last!
16:49:00
18:50 Spent the last couple of hours transcribing this notebook into blot.im. My phone’s battery is now at 5% so I’ll spin by the supermarket again to pick up a new notebook and then head back to the hostel for the evening. It’s interesting that it’s actually less challenging using the phone for writing and blog composition than it is using a Windows PC localised to French and without all the convenience tooling I’m accustomed to. At the hostel, the PC case lives behind a wall so I decided not to impose the rigmarole of booting it up from my disk on the staff. €6.20 for two pots of tea.
19:24 €5.84 for a new notebook and microfibre towel as a trial7.
20:48:32 
20:48:45
20:37 Back in my room in the hostel, faffing mightily trying to get my salad bits for dinner assembled and down to the kitchen.8
| Item | breakfast | lunch | dinner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 eggs - boil | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2 cheese | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 2 bread | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 1 butter | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
| 1/2 salad leaves | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 3 scallions | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| 20 mandarins | 6-8 | ? | ? |
| 1 apple | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Take breakfast bread stick. it becomes lunch.
A length of baton with butter and jam. Doesn’t quite hit the spot for me.↩
The cheap price of the youth hostel comes with the condition that you clear out of the place between 13:00 and 18:00.↩
Turns out it’s just down to choosing the right roaming partnership provider and ignoring the fact that my phone reports that it’s only got a 2G signal.↩
It’s coming together really well. I’m nowhere near fluent but with the help of the phrasebook I’ve been able to make myself understood in every situation so far.↩
…and there’s a complication: France favours its own gas adapters, so I might have to pick up a local burner.↩
I never made it. Carrefour, on the way, beckoned.↩
This acid-green 30cm-on-a-side towel ended up being the only towel I needed. I carried it all the way to Istanbul.↩
I’ve noticed that keeping track of all the items I carry with me or accumulate temporarily impose a massive mental burden on me. I’m going to have to develop a strategy to deal with this. Bagging stuff is part of the solution. I don’t have a day-pack.↩
