Bon anniversaire Richard, de Nantes

Je suis en vacances à France et hier nous avons visité Nantes. (That’s about all the French I can do, I even had to google the word for yesterday). And today Richard Armitage turns 50! So, from here, near Nantes, I wish him a very happy birthday! He has shared a fun birthday video (love the glee in his face at his own jokes)…

Thanks for all the messages and the amazing fundraising. 🙏♥️🎂 https://t.co/ZogqpNXZOt

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) August 22, 2021

“Party on” he says at the end of the video…

… and that’s exacty what we’ve been doing, of sorts.

Yesterday (as I said in French above) we visited Nantes. It was a rainy, dreary day, so we didn’t get into town until late in the day (about 4pm). We wanted to be able to see at least a little bit before partying on and meeting up with a Richard Armitage fandom friend.

We couldn’t park in the garage we had wanted to as the police had closed off some roads.

We briefly spoke to a policeman who told us in French that there was a demonstration happening (we later heard the demonstration was about protesting Covid measures, we didn’t see any of the protesters ourselves). He then shrugged his shoulders and said “La France…” with a wry look on his face as if that explained everything. Cracked me up.

We found another garage, then had to wait out the worst of the rain underneath the parasol of a café next to the Chateau, and then were able to walk around Nantes for a bit, which included seeing the awesome ship sculpture Lady Butterfly had blogged about a little while ago.

Then, at 7pm, the ‘party’ began when we met up with Lady Butterfly and her partner for dinner. I don’t know Agnès, aka Lady Butterfly, well but we comment occasionally on each other’s blogs and as she lives in Nantes and I was visiting there anyway, it felt like a no-brainer to meet up. I do know she likes Richard Armitage (hence the initial connection) but, just from reading her blogs (her photography blog and her books, arts and culture blog – I admit to using Google translate a lot while reading the second) it is clear she has many other interests too.

I think we can safely say that Mr Esther, mini me and I immediately hit it off with Agnès and Monsieur Agnès, getting to know each other a little better and just having a jolly good time. Luckily their English is way better than our French, so we really were able to chat away. There was a little bit of Armitage and blog discussion but mostly we talked about all sorts of other things, getting to know each other better. We spent close to 3 hours at a delicious Indian restaurant Agnès had picked for us in the centre of Nantes and it was difficult for mini me to capture a decent picture of us through all the chatting…

I was planning to not to blog for a bit but as it is Richard’s birthday today and as I wanted to share our enthusiasm about Nantes and the people we met there yesterday, I couldn’t resist putting these words on the screen.

So: Bon Anniversaire, Richard Armitage! People in the 50+ club know how to enjoy life (these pictures of us two 50+ ladies should be proof of that), so you’ll be in good hands here. 🙂 Et à bientôt Agnès et Monsieur Agnès!