Travelling South through France
Trip Start
Jul 27, 2007
1
13
31
Trip End
Oct 22, 2007
Montpellier,
France
Sunday, September 2, 2007
After a quick breakfast of crossiants in Dijon we got back on the road and headed into the Jura cheese country. At the last minute we decided to changed our destination and headed to Besancon for a wander through the market and lunch in the park - baguette and a bbq chook. We then drove onto Poligny, the cheese capital of the region. Here we brought several cheeses to try at afternoon tea and then did a tour of the House of Cheese which told us all about how they make cheese in the region, which is unique to this part of the world. We contine south to the town of Bourg-en-Bresse to spend the night. Here I used my small of French on the unsuspecting employees at the local Macdonalds.
We left Bourg-en-Bresse the next morning heading to Grenoble but first we had to stop at another bloody market (ABM) in Voiron just out of Grenoble. When we arrived in Grenoble we found a rather large city with a river running down one side with a rather tall hill on the other side.
This hill had various buildings at the base and further up had the remains of old fortifications from medieval times. From the edge of the city ran a gondola up to the largest part of the old fort. We took this up to the top and then continued to walk further up to some caves that had been carved out more for fortification purposes. Simon then decided to lead us all to higher spot that had more ruins. It was quite a small path and our suspicions that it was the wrong way were raised when we climbing through and under bushes to keep getting higher towards our goal. When we reached the top we confirmed it was the wrong way as abit further around the hill was a nicely cleaned and much wide path. From this point you could see the entire valley that Grenoble sat in. We the descended right back down to the river and back into the city via path that weaved between the old walls built up the hill. Once we left Grenoble behind heading to the city of Valence to find some dinner and a place to stay the night. After doing several laps around the city we found a rather "classy" establishment to stay the night. Once I was in my room I considered sleeping with my pocket knife under my pillow that due to how classy a place it was. With our bags in the rooms we headed out looking for a place to eat where we found a cool pub with a resturant out the back. We had dinner and then back to the hotel and straight to our rooms.
The next morning (Sunday) we got up and were on the road by 8am as not to spend any time at the hotel (if you can call it that) in Valence. We stopped in Montelimar for breakfast. After breakfast we decided to take a detour on our way to Montpellier through a gorge Simon had spotted on the map. It was called the gorges de l'Ardeche and was amazing with a naturally eroded rock bridge in the heart of it. We weaved our way in and out of the gorge getting stopped by a herd of wild mountain goats along the way. We stopped in a town called Ales for lunch and found not much to be opened on Sundays. After lunch we pushed on to our final stop of Montpellier. We arrived in Montpellier at 4pm right on time (but not on the road we thought) and made our way across to the airport as we walked in we handed over the keys to the hire car and checked the time we were meeting Kris and Daryl (Heather's mum and stepdad). Their plane had just landed and we knew we would be on our way soon. As the people came through from the baggage area a bad feeling came over us and a few minutes later we realised they weren't on their flight. Heather checked and found they had missed a connection in the USA and they would be another 4 hours. Now I had spent time in airports due to late flights but this was something to be sitting around an airport waiting for someone else so we could continue our travelling. They finally arrived and after we picked up our new pair of hire cars we were on our way to our home for the next 2 weeks in the small town of Montagnac.
