We entered our very favourite restaurant, L’Amaya (the one taken over by the younger couple from the ancient couple who didn’t speak a word of English) to be greeted like long lost friends by the delightful French woman.  By coincidence her husband had taken a telephone booking the day before which she thought must have been us, something to do with an Englishwoman and her appalling attempt at speaking French.  We caught up with each others news like old chums over a rather nice bottle of rose while Monsieur cooked up the most delicious French delights in the kitchen.  Bob had the moules in saffron, I managed to pinch just the one,  and I had the scallops in creamy mushroom sauce.  They were both superlative.  Bob then surprised me by not going for the entrecote but instead plumped for the bream in vanilla sauce while I had some unknown sole like fish in saffron sauce.  Again superlative.  We finished with Monsieur’s perfect tarte tatin, the apples oozing delicious buttery juice with just the right hint of cinnamon.  I don’t know why we do it, it only ends up with crossed swords, but we went for just the one portion, two spoons.  We made up over the complementary liqueurs.  Bob’s rum nearly blew his head off, it could have been messy.

This morning we strolled through town, always fascinated by the burnt black walls of St Pierre, up to the Tourist Info Office to check in and out the very straightforward French way, just fill out the form on the computer, remembering to mind the Ps and Qs on the AZERTY keyboard, click to print and voila, simple and quite our favourite way of doing it!  Our meanderings continued through town down to the church where we avidly read a most interesting history of Martinique from the perspective of the Catholic Church and how it was somewhat pushed aside with the onset of secularism in France.  Interestingly the Bishop was back in France protecting his religious influence on life when the volcano blew and completely wiped out his 30,000 head flock, he therefore lived to tell the tale.  We love a bit of history.  We then walked right to the end of the village, indulged in our liking of art by admiring one of the modern sculptures that abound to celebrate the anniversary of emancipation, listened to choir practice, they were really rather good.  We wandered back through the busy market, carefully selecting mangoes, water melon and a special local mix of curry powder (after sniffing all the different types on offer), picked up our daily baguette (we are becoming so French) before wandering back to Windy with our chosen goodies.  Sorry to say, we had lunch (using the delicious curry powder) and soporifically whiled away another afternoon very happily with Kindles in the sunshine.  We watched the sun going down, accompanied by the hum of Gerry, in good voice doing his own choir practice, and the happy whoosh and thrum of the water maker.  We really are just so lazy but it is proving to be one of our favourite things to do.