Sunday August 5
Now I know why Digoin has a kind of wistful air. This morning in the wonderful wooded park on the other side of the Loire from town, while Beau was gleefully running wild, I learned from historical panels that this was once an important river port, serving all of Burgundy. The town was engaged in boat-building and everything related to river transport. When the automobile was invented and trucks took over local transportation, Digoin’s raison d’être was gone, and the town fell back on ceramic production. The local faience (or porcelain) is white with bright flowers—a cheerful homey look. But walking around the town you get a sense of grandeur that has gone.
Speaking of truckers, I noticed four Portuguese 18-wheelers parked in the allotted spaces this morning at the intersection leading to the campground. As I passed the huge municipal pool, usually still and vacant at this early hour, I heard laughing and saw four dark heads in swirls of splashes. On the wire fence hung four pairs of pants and four shirts.
I’m just saying…
I got back to camp in time to enjoy an impromptu Sunday morning concert. A camper several tents down from me was playing a squeezebox—don’t wince, he was doing it quietly and well, and there was scattered applause after each tune as campers listened over their breakfast.
The famous European disregard for modesty is accentuated in a campground like this one. In fact, it’s contagious. I have changed my pants with only my tent as a screen, and I think nothing of peeing in bushes. I sleep with French couples making love in their tents on both sides of me, and wish them a joyful dénouement.
The other night a violent storm caught me unprepared – I had noticed the lack of stars in the sky but I didn’t connect that to the possibility of a night of terrifying wind and rain as the tent became a whirling dervish with me and my dog flopping around inside like fish. In the morning I found that a branch of a red maple tree had cracked and broken in the wind, and it was resting across the back of the Kangoo, which was happily unscathed.

Tomorrow I will leave for a town called Seillac, near Blois, in the heart of Chateau country. Madame at the camp reception tells me that region of the Loire Valley is “something else”. She gave me that French glance-over-the-nose, suggesting a polite criticism. Digoin seems to be a place of country folk, not down-at-the-heels, but simple. I’m sure it will be “something else” to leave this part of Southern Burgundy and cross into the Centre, where François I and the Sun King built all those castles—one of them just for hunting—where Joan of Arc was born and defended her home town Orléans, where the Nazis set up the government in Vichy.
I am curious to see if my fellow campers there are as mellow and easy-going as here. And I wonder if I’ll see my first American tourists on this route.