Grand Hotel de la Muse et du Rozier Peyreleau

Took us a while to find a park last night as we were aiming to stay in Le Rozier which is close to the start of Gorges de Tarn as that was the drive we wanted to do today.

Unfortunately roadworks stood in our way and we took the next best option of the drive through Gorges du la Jonte.

Stunning is the best way to descirbe this drive. I got the ...

... luck at the local grocery store. Anyway... it was not to be so we just continued to the town of Gatuzieres (near Meyrueis). We drove past miles of scrubby forest land mixed with well used rocky fields and even a ski hill. This was actually all in Parc National Des Cevennes. There were hundreds of broken trees (some leaning on or hanging over the phone wires). We thought the terrible wind we had experienced was responsible ...

... The largest of these two villages is called Hauterives, and we really want to go back and make arrangements somehow to stay there at some point. We continued on out of the canyon to the town of Millau which is famous for having the highest bridge in the world. It is a 1.5 mile long bridge that spans across a large valley and the bridge reaches a height of over 1300 feet. It was built just a couple of years ago and is considered an engineering ...

We are still staying in Florac tonight, but we took a beautiful drive to this village today. The Cevennes national park countryside is gorgeous with big, green hills and hardly any homes or buildings...just countryside! We went on a 5km hike to the Chateau Roquedhouil, a nice old home built in the 1500's. There was a very tall sequoia tree that was planed in 1887 and was about 25 feet in circumference.

Well, as you can tell from the map pin, we still haven't made it to Spain yet! We are now almost a week behind schedule ... not that there was any real schedule to follow ... and hey, I'm always late for everything anyway! We got a late start the morning after the detours to the chateaux - Ian went for a ride ... and I had a sleep in! But it was ok, cause the plan was really very simple - head south ...

... climb up from the Mediterranean coast was a real test for the car, pulling the weight it has stuck behind it, but it managed it, just. The high point of the journey was the Millau Viaduct, taking the motorway across the Tarn, a few kilometres south of Millau and several hundred metres above it. We then had to drop down to the Tarn valley, then into the Jonte valley and 20 km ...

... unattractive on the outside but was clean and pleasant inside. We haven't tried the shower yet. As we sat listening to the rain and uploading photos, etc. we had a long discussion about the rest of the holiday. We used the internet to get weather forecasts for Nice, Marseilles, Perpignan, Barcelona, Milan and even Portugal, but it seems as if the whole of Europe is in for a deluge over the next 5 days. It's times like this when a ...

Tonight we are staying in a farm under the amazing Millau Bridge (or the Grand Viaduc du Milllau) "a thrilling and wondrous vision". H nips out every 10 minutes to take another photo in different light!!! We watched a program on its making on Discovery Channel before we left home and this was one of the main sights he wanted to see in France. It is 2 ...

We rented a mobil-home on the Val de l'Arre campsite near Le Vigan. Nicely located campsite, although the traffic on the rather busy road can be heard. Nice river for swimming and canoeing. Good base for trips all around the Cevennes. We made cycling trips, hiked and toured around by car. At the time of our ...

... of mine were the cloister courtyard (above left) and the massive halls of the Great Tinel and the Grand Hall. Lots of fine gothic vaultings that really give the large rooms a feeling of enormity. They create some funky patterns too, so much so that you have to admit it's one of humanity's more graceful architectural eras. In one of the final rooms there is a ...