Creuse

After visiting Rocamadour, we arrived on Tuesday evening at our second gîte of the trip, in Le Grand-Bourg, a small town in the department of Creuse. Creuse is the second least populated department in the country so we are in deepest darkest rural France now. Our accommodation is nice with a river flowing fast and high right outside our bedroom window, and the owners are very welcoming... although extremely chatty when we are tired after a long day and just want to settle in and cook dinner!

On Wednesday we head out to pursue some rural activities with our first stop at Loups de Chabrières, an animal park specialising in wolves. It's a rare dry day with the added bonus of having the park almost to ourselves, and we see several different wolf packs - European Grey Wolves, Mackenzie Wolves from Canada in both white and black variations, and Arctic White Wolves. The habitats were surprisingly spacious although that often meant you had to walk a long way around to se anything, or sometimes view the wolves from a long way away.

Hopefully the videos load!

After that we go to a nearby giant hedge maze which turned out to be really excellent (and took a good 50 minutes to complete)! With seven possible routes from the start we split up, and then both found ourselves back at the start (from opposite directions) in less than 3 minutes. Our second attempt went better and we both found successful routes through to the mid-way point of the maze. There was an added element to the maze where number boards were placed at certain intersections, and you answered a corresponding question from a list you carried with you, before taking the indicated direction. The person working there must not have thought much of our intelligence as she not only gave us the adult questions, but also the sets for 9-12 year olds AND the set for 6-9 year olds!

Once you made it half way there was an optional wooden maze to complete and then you had to work your way out of the hedge maze via another route.

If that wasn't enough, there were also 18 "skill games" to play, ranging from basketball throws, penalty shoot-outs, frisbee throwing, and a lot of other ball throwing / rolling / flinging / kicking / putting / etc. After my early points lead in the first few games, Mark crept back up steadily to surge into the lead and take the overall win by 49-43... playing the last few games almost entirely in the dark at 17:45!