We set off at 3:30am after only minimal sleep to catch the Eurotunnel, leaving a rainy UK behind for a torrential downpour in Calais (the sort where even the windscreen wiper setting marked "frantic" barely suffices) followed by around 650km of driving to stay with our dear friends Stu & Rhi in one of the most westerly points in Brittany - this was a triumph of caffeine over common sense, particularly as the satnav sent us the long way round. We spent a lovely couple of days with them, eating a lot and refusing to drive. Most notable eating experience (aside from Stu's amazing butter curry) was the creperie where there were a surprising and most welcome number of vegetarian options. I had a filling of potatoes, cheese, egg and mushrooms in mine, and polished off two further crepes stuffed with banana, caramel and Chantilly cream. I could have died.
Next stop La Rochelle several hundred more km later, stopping off at La Roche Tremblante (which, as the name suggests, is a HUGE rock balanced so precariously on a hillside that one person can make it wobble. Even more awesome, a rock shaped exactly like a mushroom (Le Champignon!). We also stopped off at Carnac to see the stones, which I have wanted to see for a long time. Unfortunately you can't walk among them in the summer, but as this is to protect the vegetation, one mustn't grumble. Temperatures started to climb as we sat on a rock with a baguette for an al fresco (or in this case, al forno) lunch before continuing south.
We had a couple of nights in La Rochelle and on reflection one would have sufficed, notwithstanding the distances travelled. We did the Old Port and the aquarium, which everyone (ie those who left reviews on tripadvisor) raved about but which we found a poor third when compared to Lisbon and even London. Still, Sid got an awesome photo:
This was one of the culinary highlights of the trip - the restaurant itself was extremely "sympa" with an outdoor terrace in a beautiful old courtyard. My starter was an artichoke salad with mixed leaves and a few strawberries and raspberries which set the whole thing off superbly. The main was turbot en papillotte with fondant potatoes, green beans and petits pois. Sublime. The thing that really set it off was the dessert, a millefeuille with apples and a caramel sauce made with beurre sel which quite took my breath away. The service was first class and we particularly enjoyed nice touches like the amuse bouches, local aperitifs (Lillet) and digestifs. We walked back to the hotel singing "j'ai bien mangé, j'ai bien bu..."
Next day was the excessively pretty village of Montignac and a visit to the caves at Lascaux, another site I had wanted to visit for such a long time - chiefly as a result of my love of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series. You can no longer visit the actual caves because the passage of bodies through them was causing all sorts of unpleasantness in the form of spores which were affecting the drawings, but the painstakingly created replica is well worth a visit. The whole thing took 20 years to create. We visited another grotte in the afternoon with a fabulous array of stalactites and stalacmites - to think it had been there undiscovered and unmolested for centuries!
On to Cahors for a one night stopover which, after Montignac, was something of a letdown. In fact, one might reasonably describe it as a shithole. Just to top it off, I had the worst meal ever, a salad with prawns and salmon. I must say the establishment promised little better, being one of those brasserie chains, but we were a bit stuck since we landed in the middle of a Blues festival and the place was heaving. But Jesus, it was rancid. And the hotel! It was like a blast from the Seventies, with none of the good bits. We took a view and were on the road by 8am next morning, replete with pain au chocolat, some diabolical coffee and a firm resolve never to go back there again. In fact the only good thing about Cahors is its relative proximity to the Languedoc.
We arrived at our final destination, a little village called Brissac le Haut, next evening after another epic drive, where we'd booked a gite for a week. Our gite was part of a chateau in the mountains and we had to take some wonderful winding mountain roads to get there and I learned that I love driving in the mountains. The views were spectacular! And so were some of the climbs. The last ascent into Brissac to the chateau was awash with hairpin bends - the combination of the two meant that the air was fragrant for a while there with the smell of burning clutch as our fully loaded Beamer made the last push to the top. Erk. But it was worth it for the view from our bedroom terrace:
We did all the stuff we wanted to in the Languedoc: we visited some beautiful little villages such as St Guilhem le Desert;
and spent some quality time in the pool which was extremely deep and as such several degrees colder than the river, but fab just the same:
And so back to Blighty after two days of driving, with an overnight stopover in Orleans.
Since we were on the road so much, I had the opportunity to form some impressions about the driving habits of our Gallic friends. While I consider myself to be a committed Francophile in many respects, I now know that this does not encompass the way in which they drive, quite literally, nose to tail and will conduct spontaneous lane changes into a space which one would hesitate to chuck a fag paper into at speed, with something that can only be described as gay abandon. Even as a seasoned driver in places like central Lisbon, I was shocked. And the fabled Peripherique in Paris, which we did roughly a quarter of on the way home, is like this but on amphetamines. Driving to work this morning, I remarked to myself just how civilised British drivers are - even the ones in white vans - by comparison.
