Gallery Rally 2015 — Jersey to Paris

Avrille to Orleans(ish)

Hello everyone, welcome to Day 3 of the Gallery Rally 2015.

After last nights relatively late night doing the update (although right now, looking at the time, we suspect last night was nothing compared to how late tonight will be!) the 7am wake up call was far from welcome - but needs must, there were clues to be solved and no doubt quizzes to be done, so we dragged ourselves out of bed and carried out the usual daily preparations, and headed down to the breakfast room.

Clearly the tiredness was getting to Heidi as well, so Mike performed one of his many duties as Navigator...

..now that was done, we joined our compatriats for breakfast...

...admired the view from the front of the hotel..

...before packing up the car and being summonsed into the classroom for this morning's quiz...

 

... this was like being back at School - well, back at a very strange school, at any rate...

We were handed our quiz and told that we had 15 minutes to answer as many as possible of the following! (NB. This is the sheet with the answers on it - it would have been much easier had we been given this one and not a blank one!)

I didn't even know there were that many flowers - let alone how someone came up with such obscure (and extremely amusing) descriptions of them!

Having tried our best (it's all anyone can ask), Chip gave us our briefing for the day, then we unfolded our maps, and started the part of the day we enjoy immensely - unravelling Chips location descriptions!

Clue Site No. 1 was "Sounds like spirits without an eye" - The town in question was Gennes - which we <thought we had> cleverly deciphered as 'Gin, but without the eye' - brilliant - and so we set course for it.

We soon found ourselves travelling though the delightful town of Angers, following carefully the route the Sat Nav had picked for us..

...and enjoying some very enjoyable sights and scenery...

...although someone always has to go and ruin it....

It was only as we neared Gennes and Mike subconciously started to sing "Gene Genie" when it suddenly dawned on us that Chip's destination clue had actually meant "Genies but without an eye" rather than anything to do with the spirt known as Gin - brilliant, we'd found the right location for the wrong reason!

Anyway, you are all probably reading this thinking how obvious that was and how on earth have we been participating in this trip since 1998 given our clear lack of ability!! Well, It doesn't matter how we get the locations as long as we get them right, right?

SO having found our way to Gennes, as the clue was "Go high church, cross smiley face sheep _______?" we followed signs from the town centre to a Church that was up the top of a very steep hill.

Wondering around the chuch whilst looking "up high" we noticed that around the church tower were various small gargoyle like stone carvings.....

- some faces, some crosses, some pigs, all sorts of images. It was when we found this particular pattern that we felt that warm feeling inside...

Happy that the missing shape was "snake", we wrote down our answer and proceeded to the next clue site!

This one was "Sweets for the holy man" - which we soon worked out was Candes-St-Martin (aka Candys for Saint Martin)

One we arrived at said location, the cryptic part of the clue was "Follow this TV programme, who does P love?"

We didn't initially realise it due to an driver/navigator communication issue, but the first part of the clue "Follow this TV programme" meant follow signs to Panorama - which we did eventually - and once there, we discovered that France was being sucked into the sky...

But we didnt have time to worry about that, we had a clue to solve.

There was a small veiwing area at for admiring the panoramic view of the end of the world...

...and all over the bricks and wooden platforms were various bits of graffiti, declaring peoples undying love for each other (presumably it's something people feel the need to do when witnessing what was quite clearly Armageddon..)

After a bit of searching high and low for something relating to "love" and "P", this ancient carving was discovered..

Safe in the knowledge that P loves H, we said goodbye to Mikes new friend...

...(fully expecting the furry fella to be sucked helplessly into an enormous cloud), and set course for Clue Site No. 3 - "Scottish Lakes". Nice and easy this one. "Loches"

On the way to Loches, we decided to stop for a spot of lunch with some Little Chefs

 

No prizes for guessing what we had for lunch!

After departing our lunch spot, we continued on to Loches, where, upon arrival, we looked for a suitable parking space near to the clearly sign-posted "Cite Royale" and went in search of a suitable building that might contain the answer to the cryptic part of the clue, which was "In the royal city opposte the man with the shiney nose who is 'armless?"

On arrival in the Royal City, we had a choice of signs to ancient buildings of Donjon or Logis Royal - we disregarded Logis as to us this was a chain of Hotels. And went with Donjons.

We had been pre-warned that we needed to pay to enter this clue a fee of €8.50, so as that is what we were charged to enter the Donjons, we figured we were on the right lines.

The place was, however, quite immense, so finding this clue might take a while....

After climbing many steps, both up to the tops of towers and then down to the dungeons...

... I met a seemlingly friendly tin man by the toilets..

... but he didn't help at all - very untalkative... so we continued to hunt.

We found an interesting room with a model of the Donjon..

... but nothing seemed to fit in there. No shiney noses or armless people...

We then found a room with ancient carvings around all of the walls.. There was even an English language pre-recorded talk descirbing the carvings and their facial features... this seemed promising...

..at first. But still no shiney nosed men. There was an armless man called Al on one wall, but experience tells us that Chip wouldn't have said anything about a shiney nosed man for the fun of it.

After walking ourselves to near exhaustion, we went back to the ticket office and asked if there was another Chateau nearby. Their answer, albeit in French, was "Yes, go down here, round the corner, past the Church and you'll see it there - it's called the Logis"

So nearly an hour and a half after arriving at a fork in the road and ignoring Logis is favour of Donjon, we returned to said fork and entered the Logis Chateaux. Fortunately, the tickets we had purchased for the Donjon were also valid at the Chateau, so whilst it had been a complete waste of time, it at least wasn't a complete waste of money!

On entering the castle, things began to look up.

We soon discovered this..

Now he DEFINATELY had a shiney nose.

After a bit of looking around opposite the shiney nosed man, we found that behind a wall (opposite the nose) was this:

Now we were happy again. Seriously behind schedule, but happy.

We left the Chateau, had a quick coffee, then headed back to the car and hit the road.

Eager to make up some of the time we had wasted, we took a few shortcuts...

Of course, making up time tends to involve burning more fuel, so we stopped for the first fill-up of the trip, where i entrusted Mike to do the honours (well, what could possibly go wrong..)

Tank full, we continue onto Clue Site No. 4 - the location clue for this one was "My Very Golden French" - which we had quickly deciphered to be a place called Montressor (Mon = My, Tres = Very, Gold = Or -all in French)

As per the previous clue, we had been informed at our morning briefing that we would need to pay an entry fee to this one. Fortuantely for us, there was only one Chateaux in Montresor!

The Cryptic part of the clue at this site was "How many dances did Chopin write?"

On arrival at the Castle, we payed our entry fee and headed into the house hoping to find something related.

At the top of the house, we discovered this..

A closer inspection of the sheet music showed we were clearly in the right place...

You can't quite read it, but Chopin's name is at the top right of the music. But how many dances did he write?

After checking a few other parts of the room, we noticed at the back of sheet music the following was printed...

Trois Valses translates to Three Waltzes - and as a Waltz is a dance, it seems logical that the answer is Three.

Happy with that, we went straight back to the car, and as we were still eager to claw back some more of our lost time, we continued with our shortcuts, although met a few more obstacles this time..

But we don't let these things bother us and were soon past and onwards to Clue Site No. 5 - "Japanese Wine?"

This one was a town called "Chabris" (we'll let you work out why thats a Japanese Wine!)

The crypic part of the clue "In the third old photo how many children are standing in the street?" led us to the Centre Ville in search of relevant 'old photo's.

We quickly found a series of 3 old photo's scattered around the town square, showing the town in times past, and No.3 seemed to contain the information we needed..

If you look at the photo below taken today of the same street, you can see how times have changed..

We were happy with our answer that there was 3 children stood in the street, so we headed back to the car and plotted the route to the 6th and final clue site of the day, which was "Uneven burns go muddled here". This turned out to an anagram of Neungs-S-Beuvron

On the way, we passed an old cinema, although it appeared to still be active..

The cyrptic part of this clue was "At the town hall what is the total fractionally?"

So we thought we would head for the Marie..

.... where we found the following placard on the front door...

As the question was "What is the total fractionally?" we simply added together the fractions, which gave us the answer of 3 (you could probably have worked that one out for yourselves!)

So the final 3 questions were all "3" - what are the chances!

We headed straight back to the car and onto the nights Hotel, where we finally arrived at 1906 precisely - and plumb last - as expected!

We handed our answer sheet in, had a well deserved beer..

Then were soon sitting down for the evening meal of (yes, you've guess it) steak!

 

After the meal, it was time for the scores and positions!

 

So the good news is, we've crept up the leader-board. By one place!

Tomorrow, the last day, see's the return of the Scavenger Hunt as well as the usual clues, so we'll see where we end up after all that tomorrow night!

Todays route is below - so all that remains is for us to say goodnight and see you tomorrow!