¡Buenas Weinachten!

We're spending Christmas day, to our surprise, in a campsite in Calpe, on the Costa Blanca in the Valencia region (not the Costa Brava as Stella has been telling people – not sure when we crossed the 'border').


We were keen to get into a proper site where we could celebrate the festive season with unlimited showers, mains electricity, hanging our washing out to dry and not being moved on by the police, having a drink at lunchtime and not having to drive in the afternoon.  We only called into Calpe to reconnoitre for a later visit when the Swansea Dunstones come south in January, but the campsite was much nicer than the one we'd planned ... so here we are.

We're surrounded by lovely German, Dutch and a few British people.  We were hoping to have an opportunity to improve our Spanish during this trip, but so far this Christmas it's our rusty 'O' level German that's been exercised.  Most of the others are here for weeks or even months, settled in big caravans with big awnings with the full paraphernalia of fairy lights, Christmas trees and a full set of electric kitchen appliances.  On our first morning our neighbours took charge and badgered us into moving our van to a sunnier pitch.  We moved with some grumbling, but the result was that we spent Christmas morning eating pancakes outside while Scooby (AKA 'Liebe Hündchen') basked in the sunshine.

Big parts of the town have a very German flavour.  There's a bar by the supermarket called 'Ambiente Aleman' where Germans sit at the bar drinking lager and eating sausage with sauerkraut and dumplings, and the local baker has a pretzel logo.  We'd be much less tolerant of their British equivalents, but Germans do Gemütlich so well that so far it just makes us want to visit Germany in the summer.

At mid-day on Christmas day we were disturbed from sunning ourselves by a car moving slowly through the site tooting its horn, then delighted to find it was the family who own the site distributing a bottle of cava and a rose in a gift bag to each pitch.  Finally we got to say '¡Feliz Navidad!' to someone!

Our neighbours are so delighted with the warm weather and the sunshine, it's impossible to continue to fool ourselves into believing that December in northern Europe is anything other than miserable.  Will we ever be able to put up with it again?  Will you be able to put up with it again after reading this? Will you be able to put up with us when we get back?

On Christmas Eve we watched some Spanish TV – very different from what we'd expect in Britain. One item was a long 'round up' of what the Spanish royal family have been up to this year followed by the King's annual speech. He spent most of his speech discussing the economic crisis, saying how important it was that all Spaniards should unite to overcome it. He also had a photo in the background of the Spanish World Cup team and said how proud everyone was of their achievement.

However, the following programme, which was extremely entertaining, had features on how various groups of people were celebrating Christmas in different parts of Spain. This programme highlighted the diversity of Spain – and made us wonder if the King had any chance of uniting the country, if he even really has a single country to unite. The programme featured rough female cockle pickers in Galicia, doing a hard, cold job in icy December waters, dressed up for Christmas and very respectable but obviously very poor; wild gypsy-like people from Jerez who sang and danced lustily in a very un-european way  – even a granny of about 70 was flashing her legs and giving a full flamenco performance on camera; a very camp drag queen from Seville who was having a ball with some very odd friends in his apartment; and a group of incredibly elegant and sophisticated Porsche-driving 'beautiful people' from Majorca who were so rich and stylish that it hurt.  What do they have in common apart from having the same King on their stamps?

On the way down here in the run-up to Christmas we passed through Catalonia.  We're planning to  go back later but didn't dare stay for Christmas because they're too odd.  A typical trip to Barcelona doesn't give anything like the full impression.  Too odd.  We thought we'd best leave them to themselves.

Last year on British TV the Jonathan Ross show was very excited to find out about the Catalan tradition of the 'caganer'; the figure in the traditional nativity scene who squats in a quiet corner, defecating.  Ross had models specially made of himself and his guests, but the shops in Llieda routinely sell models of defecating politicians, royalty, footballers, Simpsons characters and the Statue of Liberty.

In the run up to Christmas the shops and market stalls all over Catalonia are full of Caga Tiós.  They're unusual, but a bit cute; something between a log and a dog. 

Stella loved them and we thought we might buy a small one if we weren't so short of space.  However, with a bit of Googling we find they are the traditional shitting/ giving log that Catalan children beat with sticks, while singing traditional songs, so that they defecate dried fruit and sweets for them.

During a brief visit to Valls, in the Catalan heartland north of Tarragona, we came across another Catalan tradition that even the BBC didn't uncover.  On the sweet stall in the market were 'Primaveras', which looked like this:

During our first brief visit to Catalonia in the autumn they were preparing for their general election for the Catalan  parliament.  One of the candidates, an advocate of independence, used the slogan 'To be Catalan is to work hard and think clearly'.

He forgot to say 'and to be preoccupied with faeces'.  Or is it that the Catalans are normal and everyone else is odd?

¡Bones festes! (that's Valencian, by the way) one and all.

A Spot of Gardening in Languedoc

Our meanderings have been rather formless so far, as we enjoy the unprecedented opportunity to follow our noses and the weather forecast.  One of the few places we were definitely going to visit was Cazouls lés Béziers, a small town in Languedoc, home of Rémy André.

We (the Swansea Dunstones) first met the Andrés in the late 1970s when we chanced on their restaurant 'Au Bon Pasteur' in a back street of Carcassonne.  Rémy was poised and charming front of house, making it all look calm, while Giselle toiled in the oppressive heat of the tiny kitchen.  My little sister and his little son started playing together, we got chatting and kept in touch.  I spent a few weeks with them in the 1980s, then more or less lost contact until after they had retired from the restaurant business. 

With their new found freedom they started to think about travelling, and came to see us in Wales in 2005. We all had a wonderful, if exhausting, time.  It left me thinking how stupid I'd been to stay out of touch for so long, as much through embarrassment at my rusty French as anything else.  A few months later, Giselle had a horrible accident (you are happier for not knowing the details) and died.

Rémy won't mind me saying that in many ways he's a caricature Frenchman of the old sort.  He's spent his working life cooking and serving food, has very strong opinions about how it should be done, and normally considers the traditional French way to be best.  Usually, faced with the resulting meal, it's hard to disagree with him.  After retiring from the restaurant he slipped further into the stereotype, cultivating a luxuriant moustache and taking over a few parcels of vines to keep himself busy.

His English is good, honed during two years of working for Cunard, but rusty with lack of use.  We both had good French 'O' levels but the decades have eaten away at our skills leaving us with one and a half tenses each and a strange patchy vocabulary all mixed up with Welsh and Spanish.  Given that, conversation is surprisingly easy.  Rémy remembers enough English to help out, knows how to simplify his French for us, and anyway likes to talk in gestures and comic-strip sound bubbles as much as in ordinary words, so we get along 'pas mal'.

He has a bottomless fund of tales from a busy life; childhood in cool green Brittany, national service on a fisheries protection vessel in the North Atlantic, two years being the perfect French waiter for Cunard, time in restaurants in Paris, before Giselle and he took the plunge and opened their own place in Carcassonne.  During his decades in the south the sun and the wine and the olives have marinaded him until he's become a native, embedded in the culture and traditions of the Midi*.

We stayed with him for two days in early December, did a circuit of the Hérault region and returned for another quick visit (partly to pick up some parcels he was keeping for us).  We had intended to spend just a Friday night with him, but he had a special treat arranged for the Sunday morning (12 December) so we were persuaded to hang on.

On Sunday morning in the big blue van we followed Rémy out of Cazouls into the sunny vineyards.  We arrived next to a little farm building (a 'Grangette') a little after 10am, to find some of the others had already started. .

The event was an annual working party that's developed into a tradition.  We were faced with a vineyard of old, gnarled vines, with no steel wires, growing unsupported like small trees, but with this year's growth of vines sprawling across the stems and across the ground like brambles.  The job today was to cut the trailing shoots short and pile them into bundles for burning. Someone would have to work their way through later doing the detail of the pruning, but at least they would not have to do it in a tangled thicket of vines.

The team of people worked their way down half a dozen rows, then collected the bundles for the fire and returned to start another set of rows. The atmosphere was more like a party than real work (although it was tough on the hands and elbows after a few hours).  There was lots of chat and laughing, tiny children on pink plastic tractors getting in the way, and dogs romping and digging amongst the vines.

Everyone here seemed to have a clean-shoed day job, but country roots.  In this area, it seems the wine industry is kept alive by the weekend labour of office workers yearning for some fresh air, wood smoke and to take care of grand-dad's vines.

The work was all done by one o'clock.  We returned to the fire where a couple of metres of sausage had been cooked on a grill, potatoes had been baked in the embers of the vine trimmings and mountains of bread, pate, wine, home cured olives, saussison were laid out on a picnic blanket.  More chat and laughs, sitting around a heap of good food in the sunshine.  We visitors probably understood around half of the chat, but got most of the joie de vivre.

But we had miles to go and Spain to see, so at about 3pm we said our farewells and headed off south.

*  However, an odd fact – Rémy was the only person present to refer to the potatoes as 'pommes de terre' rather than 'patatas'.  Everyone there was proudly French, but the influence of Spain, Catalonia and Languedoc is strong in this area.

Celebrating the Birth of the Baby Cheeses

We were heading East on the D999; really heading for an aire de stationment and the famous viaduct at Millau, when we were distracted by signs for Roquefort sur Soulzon, home of the world famous Roquefort cheese.

We spent the night in the car park in front of the tourist information office, looking up the hill at the steeply sloping village sheltered by sheer floodlit cliffs.

The following morning (9th December) we headed off on foot towards the cheese caves operated by the 'Papillon' company, where two uncomfortably cold looking young blonde women were waiting in a big cheese shop just inside the entrance.  One of them took us downstairs to show us a film of cheese making at Papillon in the 1920s and now, then led us down steep narrow staircases to the caves. 

The caves consist of low ceilinged underground rooms filled with damp looking oak shelves.  The walls are largely concrete, but some are chiselled out of the stone.  In places they've taken care to leave open the natural faults which ventilate the caves.  The thing that makes the caves so special is that the flow of air through the faults in the rocks maintains them at a steady temperature and high humidity, ideal for maturing cheese.  Everywhere we went, thermometers and hygrometers were suspended in corners, to confirm that the temperature and humidity was, as expected, the same as it's been for centuries.

I was surprised (and alarmed!) to find the caves are hollowed out of the loose rock which was dislodged from the cliff by a volcanic eruption, not the bedrock itself.  If they were starting today I wonder if they would get permission to excavate into a heap of loose rock on top of which a village has been built!

It's a cramped place to move cheese around in large quantities, helped by a small cargo lift in one corner, but with low ceilings and narrow passages.  When we visited all the shelves were empty – she explained that production was just resuming after the lambing season, and the first cheeses were arriving from the dairy tomorrow!  Drat!

The process:
Milk from hundreds of sheep farms is taken to their dairy about 45 km from Roquefort.  The milk is warmed and rennett is added, then left for two hours to coagulate.

According to the film the founder of the company studied the old hand made processes and developed machines which replicate the movements of the old artisan cheese makers, cutting the curds with a mesh of steel wires then letting it stand again, then more cutting and stirring.

Curds are then transferred to cake tin sized cylindrical boxes (traditionally perforated metal, now plastic) for the whey to drain out.  Penicilium roquefortii powder is added to start the blueing.  Then it's packed into steel racks and turned every day (one person in ten seconds turning a steel cube which must hold over a tonne of cheese, compared to workers turning each cheese individually in the 1920s).  The consolidation and drying of the cheese is all through natural drainage under gravity – it's not pressed like cheddar would be.

Cheeses are then demoulded (now quite hard and safe for the machinery to roll it around) and salted  all over the surface.  Now they're ready for the caves and are drilled with many small holes to let air in, wrapped in perforated tin foil (real tin.  It stops a rind from forming, and avoids the need to scrub the cheeses clean before sale like they had to in the 1920s) and stood on their sides on the wooden racking.

Once ready, months later, they're unwrapped, cut in half to check the blueing has progressed evenly, then packaged.  There are several varieties: gold wrapping for the premium brand with most ageing (sold in a velvet lined metal box as if it was a watch), then black for the classic version, and a milder younger cheese in red packaging.  Since 1977 Papillon have also produced a white and green organic version; one of the first organic products to be certified in France.

To reach a wider market Papillon have developed a range of other cheeses and olive oil.  All impressive and very tasty.  We remembered how short of space we are and restricted ourselves to half a dozen sixty degree slices as gifts to friends and to ourselves.

Before we left the UK we rashly discussed a cookery book with a few people.  It's not going well.  So far it only has three recipes in it, but this one is ridiculously quick, easy and delicious.

Ingredients (serves two):
Four hands full of penne
Two small dark green courgettes cut into hazel nut sized chunks.
A chunk of creamy Roquefort (How big?  Let your conscience be your guide!  A golf-ball sized piece should do it.)

Method:
Bring a large pan of water to boil (no need for salt), then add the pasta and simmer.  Three minutes short of the pasta being ready, add the courgette.  Return to the boil, finish cooking the pasta.
Drain, add the Roquefort, let it melt and stir it through.

Ideally eat it with some crusty French bread and a bottle of Corbières.

Surrounded by soft southerners!

We're still in the Hérault Departement in Languedoc.  After a few days in the hills around Lodève we're moved down to the Mediterranean coast and are parked up in Mèze near Sète.

We're surrounded by people complaining about the cold, and keep reminding them that they are actually living on a narrow strip of habitable terrain on the southern fringe of a frozen continent.  They don't believe us.

On Friday night we stayed at a France Passion site at a winery just outside Mèze.  The proprietor was an unhappy bundle of clothes behind the counter.  When we told her she was living in the warmest part of Europe she turned dreamy and started wistfully listing places that might be warmer “... Málaga, Palermo …. maybe Corsica...”.  We cheered her up a little by buying a lot of her products.

It was chilly in the mountains -  some frost and ice on the puddles in the morning, but bright and sunny during the day.  The 6kg refill of propane that lasted us a month in Blaye in September has gone in a week (but we have not been using mains power much, so that gas has heated our water, space heating as well as cooking).

Yesterday on the beach between Sète and Agde the sky and the sea were both a deep blue, and the air was so clear we could see the tops of yachts' masts peeking over the horizon.  It wasn't sun-bathing weather but one fleece was enough.  We were glad we were there rather than Porthcawl. Scooby had his first paddle in the Mediterranean, but we didn't join him.

In the supermarket everyone was wrapped up warmly, including several elderly ladies in full length Muscovite fur coats and hats.  When we called into Mr Bricolage for some chemical toilet fluid, it was obvious that everything to do with heating and insulation was selling well.  The man in front of me had his arms full of pipe lagging, the man behind was cradling an electric radiator, and in the carpark a member of staff was assembling a gas fired radiant heater to show a shivering dark skinned couple how it worked. 

They don't seem to be at all prepared for this weather.  I no longer feel that I'm the nesh one!  I suppose it's partly because we're from further north, but also I think living in the van has toughened us up a bit.

To put it in perspective, for anyone who's reading this later on; this is the week when Gatwick airport was closed by snow, commuters in South East England were stranded on trains for ten hours, it was minus 20°C in Scotland, minus 17°C in Builth Wells and minus 6°C in Swansea  In France the weather took up half the national news, the main A75 motorway between Clemont-Ferrand and Montpellier was closed by snow, and the Rhône Departement opened its leisure centres to house rough sleepers.

The Pyrenees

We're glad we visited the Ebro valley, but after a few days in the area around Zaragoza we were starting to get a bit downhearted.  It's intensely cultivated countryside with very little to see in autumn apart from stubble and sad patches of wilting vegetables.  It's also dry and grey, and the industrial hinterland of Zaragoza sprawls for miles beyond the city.  Central Zaragoza was interesting for a few hours' visit, but most of the features that are more than about thirty years old seem to be associated with the most alien and alienating strand of Spanish Catholicism.

So our hearts were lifted when we headed northwards and upwards into the green space, pure air and clear skies of the Pyrenees.

We've had a good snoop around, trying to see as much as we can before the weather gets too cold or snow closes the passes.  We've had a look at the Ordessa Y Monte Perdido National Park, shopped in crazy Andorra, taken a quick loop through the western edge of Catalonia , over the mountains into Ariege in France, then to Gavarnie in Midi Pyrenees where we've seen the north face of Mont Perdu (the same Monte Perdido that we were admiring from the south a couple of weeks ago).

Our impressions:

	Blimey they're big.  No surprise really, I knew they were big, but they still made an impression.  Mount Snowdon is a little over 1,000 metres tall, and the parks authority can barely keep a rack railway and a cafe operating on the barren summit.  At 1,000 metres here, there are tables on the terrace with views of the peaks looming over you.  If the road goes up over 2,000 metres you might want to check it's not closed by snow.  It's only the 3,000 metre peaks that people really dress up for.
	They're very steep. Exploring the mountains is much easier with walking poles, but there is still a definite tendency towards sore thigh and calf muscles the day after a long hike. Fortunately the views from the top always make the climb worthwhile. I'm so glad that neither of us suffer from vertigo or we would have missed some amazing views.
	They're very obviously growing.  The Iberian peninsular is drifting into the rest of Europe, and the resulting crunch is throwing up this wrinkle of land that is the Pyrenees.  It's happening very quickly, a few centimetres a year (Yawn!).  OK it doesn't sound like much, but it's really obvious that it's happening.  There's a sense of mountains bursting through the earth like mushrooms, with dirt falling off them as they expand.  Stuff is falling  off everywhere; craggy frost shattered peaks are shedding scree, river gorges are choked with boulders and mountain roads have traffic lights that turn red when avalanches cross the road.
	People are much slower than dogs at running up hills – four legs are better than two.
	Snow makes everything look gorgeous and in the Pyrenees is it particularly bright, shiny and clean. It's hard to stop taking photos of snow topped mountains with the sun shining brightly in a clear blue sky (it's even harder to stop when you've located the 'snow' setting on the camera and start getting some decent shots!)
	When we go high up they make a big fuss about the view.  Views are boring.  What's the point in looking at a thing if you can't smell it?
	They're culturally diverse.  For most of human history it's been so hard to get around in this terrain that pockets of distinct culture have been able to survive (most obviously Basque and Catalan).  Every valley has its own cheese of course.  At Gavarnie I knew that Spain was less than 5 kilometres away, but looking up at Mont Perdu it seemed obvious why these folk spoke French and their neighbours spoke Spanish; there was no way they were going to be socialising across that barrier.  Then a national park interpretation  board gave another perspective; until the nineteenth century there was no road from Gavarnie to France either, and people here may well have spoken Spanish and met their Spanish neighbours as often (rarely) as they did people from the rest of France.
	Snow's brilliant for thirty minutes. It's almost as good as the beach; you can dig in it and you can pretend to lose your toy in it and you can put your nose in it.  After thirty minutes it makes hard bits on the fur between your pads and you have to go and stand somewhere where there's no snow like under a tree or like on top of a person.
	Leaving footprints in deep, pure white snow always gives me a thrill, and finding places where the snow is powdery, fresh and nearly comes up to my knees is very exciting. I loved finding animal tracks in the snow too and trying to decide what they were – I'm sure we saw Izard tracks at the Cirque de Gavarnie which was very exciting; wish we'd seen the actual animal though. Basically, snow is fantastic when you don't have to try and drive to work in it!
	It's biologically diverse.  Many of the places we've visited have a broadly familiar looking vegetation; oak, beech, birch etc, but half the obvious plants look completely unfamiliar.  The sky is full of raptors, the woods are full of weird and wonderful mammals (in spite of the efforts of the hunters).  There are various reasons for this; the extreme variations in altitude provide a wider range of habitats, being part of mainland Europe means more species can reach the area.  I knew this, it's not a surprise, but it still made an impression.
	In the snow things hide under the snow.  You can smell them and you can hear them and you can  pounce on them but you can not see them.
	We may have, by chance, picked the very best time to explore the Pyrenees. Any warmer and the uphill climbs would have been unbearable, any colder and we'd have had trouble with the roads and stopping the water in the van's tanks from freezing. We were also completely out of tourist season; too late for the summer visitors and too early for the skiers. That could have been a problem if we'd needed hotels and restaurants, but with a quick stop at a supermarket before heading off to the isolated spots, we had everything we needed in the van. On some days we walked for hours and barely saw another person. Some of the villages were almost completely closed, with rows of gift shops, cafés and even food shops shut up while the owners presumably have a rest before the winter season starts in mid December. Thankfully it also meant we could 'free park' overnight without anyone minding.
	When we go up high I need an extra sleeping bag inside my usual sleeping bag.  It's a good idea that I had that they should buy that for me.
	It's a great place to visit but I don't think I'm tough enough to live there.

Ebro Valley and the first significant foul-up

We headed down the Ebro towards Zaragoza, to see what this part of Spain was like and to get to one of the few places in Spain where we can fill up the gas cylinder that we use for heat and cooking.

Just one more wine post:
As we passed through stone outcrops in southern Rioja and Zaragoza province, we noticed lots of chambers excavated into cliff faces.  At a little place called Quel, we found out what at least some of them are. 

Many of the families of Quel, as in other towns in the area, own underground bodegas. They've burrowed into the cliffs to make caves where there is a constant, moderate temperature suitable for making and maturing wine. At Quel the bodegas are excavated into a hillside on the opposite side of the river to the town.  The hillside is studded with doorways like a Hobbit village, and small brick sheds cluster on the hilltop.  In Quel they drop grapes down chutes in the sheds into the underground bodegas.  All the equipment and apace for maturing wine is inside.  The Quel bodegas are being mapped and restored so there were interpretation boards (but no bodega open to view).  Many looked abandoned, but everywhere we went there was a strong smell of wine.

The other good find in Quel was a coin operated public weighbridge (bascula municipal).  We put 50 cents in the slot and got a printed ticket to confirm we're legal: 3.33 tonnes.  That means we can buy 170 kgs of wine and ham.  At that moment it started pouring with rain.  Good timing – we set off to find a spot to spend the night.

It wasn't easy.  We tried a few unsuitable places then started to follow signs for Parque Bardenas Reales, a biosphere reserve, hoping to find a visitors' centre carpark or similar.  It was raining really heavily.  Bardenas Reales turned out to be a barren treeless expanse of rough grazing looking (as far as we could see in the dusk) like Welsh uplands.  It was getting dark so pulled off the road into a layby.  We saw a lane running down into the valley and thought it was worth a quick look in case there was a more sheltered spot.  The van started slipping, the ABS kicked in, the lane looked rough.  Not promising, best not go too far.  We'd already gone too far.  Tried backing out but couldn't see well enough to keep on the track, so tried a 3 point turn ... wheels spun.  Stuck!  It was almost dark now, there were not even any bushes to cut and shove under the wheels, and even if we got moving on branches we had 200m of greasy lane to negotiate.  Hopeless.  Van leaning over badly.  Pelting rain.

We no longer any choice about where to camp for the night, so we settled in and spent the evening checking our recovery policy, looking up 'stuck in the mud' in the Spanish dictionary and generally planning our escape and trying to keep the mud out of the van. (Scooby went out just before bedtime and came back with his feet caked in mud – big clods of sticky clay between his toes; not so easy to keep the van clean!)

The following day started cold but dry, and soon warmed up.  The place looked much more attractive in the strong sunshine.  We started to implement our recovery plan; had breakfast, packed up, found the towing eye and R walked up to the main road to find a milepost to say how far we were from Tudela.

Just before phoning for help, we decided to have one more go at driving out as the sun had dried the clay a little.  We put stones under the front wheels, rocked the van out of its mud hole and got facing in the right direction.  Good, at least that will make the tow easier. Tried to get moving up the hill but slipped, then got some traction on the stubble of someone's crop, got some momentum, turned and got moving on the lane!  Hearts in mouths, we got up the lane slipping all the way and miraculously popped out onto the firm tarmac of the main road.  We set off triumphantly back towards Tudela, with blocks of hard clay flying off our wheels and shattering on the road.

After that we fled to Zaragoza's immaculate new municipal campsite where we spent hours washing towels, mats, the van and ourselves to get back into reasonably respectable condition.

The lessons learned?  Lesson one is that this van is really really bad in slippery conditions.  You can't get away with taking liberties like you can with our usual small light car.  It feels deceptively like a car on the road, but it's more than twice the weight of our Fiesta.  Lesson two, don't panic.  Time, and the Spanish sunshine saved us in this case without having to call out a camión grua. Lesson three is to make sure you pick your spot for the night while there's still daylight.  That's getting more tricky as the days shorten, but we're certainly taking more care.

A little while after this we headed up into the Pyrenees to visit the beautiful Ordessa y Monte Perdido (the lost mountain) National Park; the scenery was stunning and we were surrounded by snow topped mountains. However, as we headed up, and up towards the car park the road started to get a bit snowy, and slippery, and then more snowy and slippery … Remembering our mudhole experience we turned round and headed back down to warmer ground – we didn't fancy a night spent stuck in the snow!

We have now learned our lesson and bought snow chains for the van. 

Meeting an old friend for the first time – La Rioja

Maybe it's in my blood.  A few years ago a London trained chef opened a very pretentious restaurant in a seedy part of Swansea.  A few months later, in an interview with a national newspaper, he managed to alienate most of his potential clients by saying how backward Swansea people were and how little taste they had.  He illustrated this by saying that all his customers asked for Rioja; that was the only wine they knew.  I seem to remember he was heading back east down the M4 less than a year later.

Provincials we may be but we've both been enjoying Rioja wines for years; fruity, oaky, they just seem to be our kind of thing.

… and reliable; we seem to stand a good chance of getting something enjoyable even buying blind and not spending a fortune.

… and distinctive; the Rioja red wines are made from 80-90% temperanillo grapes, aged in oak.  That seems to give the wine a character that no-one outside Spain seems to imitate, perhaps because Spain does it so well and cheaply.

… and exceptional.  Some of our most memorable bottles have come from La Rioja.  The white wine we ordered by accident at the Greenhouse (a now defunct Cardiff vegetarian restaurant) that turned out to cost several times more than we expected but to be worth every penny (but was so strong we forgot to note the name).  The affordable  red that even succeeded in impressing Anne Dunstone (a Campo Viejo Gran Reserva, I think).  The red from a tiny unknown bodega that we stumbled across in a pub in Church Stretton then hunted down to a wine merchant in Nottingham (Gustales Crianza from Bodegas Navajas).  The white we thought might have been the same as the one from the Greenhouse that we failed to track down on a trip to Barcelona, only to find it in Cowbridge (Viña Tondonia).

So, something of a pilgrimage, this.  We were very keen to see the place these wines came from, find out something about how they are made, and of course taste a few.

So we've spent a few days exploring La Rioja, and here it is:



It's not big at all. From what I can make out most of the area is a wide alluvial plain between two ranges of stunning mountains.  This photo was taken from San Leon (1228m) near the Puerto de Herrera pass in the mountain range separating La Rioja from the Basque country and Vitoria / Gasteis.  It's looking south across the plain towards the mountains of southern Rioja (not very clear through the haze, but pretty substantial, you can ski there).  Logronio is off to your left, Haro to the right, Laguardia straight ahead.  This plain includes two of La Rioja's three regions; Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa.  The third, Rioja Baja, is out of sight to the left and known more for vegetable growing than wine.

The standard story is that Bordeaux wine makers whose vines were failing due to the Phyloxera epidemic brought their know-how to Rioja which continues to make wine using the original nineteenth century Bordeaux methods.  In fact, both areas have changed and diverged over the years.  The differences are very interesting:

• In Bordeaux everything has to be done in the Chateau; the Chateau's own grapes are crushed, fermented, pressed, matured and bottled on site.  In Rioja the bodegas seem to have much more freedom to move things around and blend wines from different areas.
• Riojan wine makers are very proud that they still mature all their wine in Bordeaux barriques. No-one seems to have told them that for the last three years Bordeaux has been allowed to use oak shavings instead of maturing in barrels.
• Different grapes of course.  Mostly Merlot in one half of Bordeaux, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon on the Medoc side of Bordeaux, mostly Temperanillo in Rioja.
• Different cultivation of the grapes.  Half the parcels of Riojan vines seem to be growing with no support at all, and are pruned back to a gnarly stump every winter.  In Bordeaux they are pruned to an elegant 'T' shape with their arms strapped to taught steel wires.
• Related to that, much more hand picking in La Rioja.  We missed the harvest but we're told half the vines are still hand picked.  Certainly a lot of the vines we've seen, unsupported and with long straggly side shoots and bushy tops, would have been torn apart if they'd been machine harvested.

It's a shame we missed the harvest, but we were busy seeing interesting things elsewhere.  The current state of the 2010 wine is that it's completed alcoholic fermentation and the bodegas are separating the wine from the solid remains of the grapes.  There are purple heaps of freshly pressed grape skins in all the yards.  Next comes several months of malo-lactic fermentation before the ageing process begins.

Still, this has been a great time of year to visit if only because of the spectacular colours of the vines in autumn. The Riojan tourist authority could really make a big deal of this if they wanted to, like New England in the fall or cherry blossom time in Hokkaido.  Every parcel of vines seems to be a different colour and every colour seems hand picked to complement its neighbour.  This photo was taken from the Dinastia Vivanco wine museum near Haro:

We found Bodegas Navajas' wines were for sale in reception at our campsite in Navarette.  We popped round the corner to the bodega and bought a few bottles.  A small place, very much a farmyard and a factory, not at all geared up for visitors (many crazed snarling Alsatians in the yard), but happy to chat.  Apparently 2010 is going to be good, maybe excellent (but I suppose he would say that.  The official Consejo Regulador de la Denominación de Origen Calificada Rioja chart of vintages shows every year since 1972 has been above average).

At the other extreme are places like Bodega Ysios, a contemporary temple to wine:



Current location: back in the excellent campsite in Navarette.

Coming soon, a post that's not about wine.  Promise!

Bordeaux to Basque Country

Sand, sea, a happy dog.

I thought Rhosilli was an amazing long sandy beach, two miles of uninterrupted sand from Worms Head to the Loughor estuary.

I thought the series of beaches stretching west from the Ogmore estuary were quite something; Newton Beach, a few rocks then Trecco Bay, Rest Bay, a few more rocks at Sker Point then Kenfig Sands, the Kenfig River then Morfa Sands, the Afon Afan then Aberafan Beach, Crymlyn Burrows and the sweep of Swansea Bay round to where the sand peters out in the mud of Mumbles Roads and the rocks of Mumbles Head.   At least twenty miles of sandy beaches, uninterrupted apart from a few rocky headlands, estuaries and the Corus Steelworks deep water harbour.

The Côte d'Argent made all that seem a bit inadequate.  The name was coined by a group of journalists who travelled up the coast early in the 20th century, then picked up by the local authorities as a marketing tool.  The journalists said the sands stretched uninterrupted from Biarritz to Cap Ferret.  Actually, on the northern side of Cap Ferret they continue at least to Soulac on the tip of the Médoc.  It must be one hundred and fifty miles at least.

We stumbled onto it at Lacanau Océan; an immaculate strip of fine squeaking sand backed by towering dunes.  Inland from the dunes, a forest of 'Pine Maritime'.  Seaward from the sand, a steeply sloping waterline where Atlantic waves thunder endlessly, then the vast blue ocean.

Out of season a few surfers hang on.  You see them in their hand painted vans with towels pinned across the windows, parked up in odd corners.  Out of season no-one seems to mind.  Sometimes we even saw them in the water.  The surf isn't always up to scratch, but when the wind's in the right direction there's a huge reach and big deep-ocean waves.  The hairdressers in Lacanau had a sign 'Last hairdressers before America.  Next haircut Miami 6,000 km”.

We kept visiting other coastal towns to see if the beach had run out yet; Carcans, Biscarrosse, Mimizan, Soustans, all the same story.  Every morning we were stunned by the beautiful beaches (we got a lot of very similar photographs), and every morning Scooby went wild with delight digging, swimming and chasing  his ball (it almost killed the poor old fellow), but to be honest, it got a bit samey.  Walk out of sight of the resort town and you couldn't tell where you were.  Even within site of the resort town, they all look pretty much alike, especially in autumn; a shuttered surf shop, a bar, a seafood restaurant and a waffle stall.

But this incredible stretch of uniformly beautiful sand helps satiate the French population's love of seaside summer holidays.  Near Arcachon we got lost looking for a free campsite and drove for miles alongside the fence line of a deserted summer holiday camp.  This area must be able to absorb millions of people; every Frenchman and woman who can get time off work, plus a fair number of northern Europeans who are in on the secret.  There's space enough even for the unsociable and the naturists to wander a few hundred metres from the boardwalk and find a stretch of sand they can have to themselves.

So in the dark days of Word War 2 this must have been the dream posting:

“Liebe Mütti” (the Atlantic coast was occupied by Germany from 1940) “They said we were going to be sent to the eastern front to support the attack on Stalingrad, but there was a last minute change of plans and they've ordered us to guard this beach instead.  It's three days sailing from England, two weeks sailing from America and far out of range of the RAF, so I'm not expecting much action.  Please send me some Blutwürst and my swimming trunks, tell Granny I don't need any more mittens.”

The strandline is also amazingly clean, apart from these things:

Anyone know what they are?  There are millions of them.  Some of them look like pasta shapes, but they're definitely not edible.

Basque Country

A strange sense of homecoming.  After weeks in Bordeaux and the flat sandy plain of Landes, we were suddenly climbing through lush green hills on a winding road lined with oak trees.  The hills were draped with fields in which sheep and cattle grazed.  Even the road signs were in two languages (with one of the languages obliterated with aerosol paint).

It was great to have some topography again.  Even the mist was comforting.  The old farmers here wear berets like those of Carmarthenshire wear flat caps (the British think of berets as typically French. The French think of berets as typically Basque.  The Basques think of berets as typically Basque, and they really do wear them).

Some things are very different to home.  We climbed a steep slippery path through a sodden oak wood (more sweet chestnut trees than I'm used to, but generally pretty familiar), emerging on a rutted track, separated from the adjacent field by a wonky barbed wire fence.  So far so familiar, but the field was filled with neat rows of chilli plants (Piment d'Espelette, maybe more on that later), thriving  under the grey sky.  It was quite a jolt of unfamiliarity to see the perfect red fruits ripening there in the open air.

This blog is lagging badly behind events.  We're still in the Basque country, but on what the Basque nationalists call the southern Basque country and the Spanish nationalists call Spain.  We're currently (31 October) parked up  in Victoria / Gasteis watching Spanish telly and listening to the rain.

Bordeaux vendage up close

I (Richard) have been getting my hands dirty (purple) with the Bordeaux grape harvest – a fascinating experience.  The work was at Château Rousselle, a producer in the Cotes de Bourg area not far from Blaye, which we'd visited during our previous trip in 2007.  The proprietor, Vincent Lemaitre, has run the château for just over a decade so is a relative newcomer and not embedded in the traditions as some of his neighbours are. 

Wine making in Bordeaux is heavily regulated;  the grape varieties are specified (predominantly Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon), the yield per hectare is limited, the areas which can be cultivated are limited by law.  The Bordeaux authorities have traditionally been very cautious about accepting changes which they feel might threaten the area's distinctiveness and its good reputation.   Within these constraints Vincent aims to make a great wine at a realistic price, and  is happy to use the latest technical and scientific tools to help him do this.

The first day (6 October) was a bit awkward.  Everything was arranged for the harvest, the regular team was in place and there was plenty to do.  The last thing they really needed was a clueless visitor with poor French trying to help out, but they had agreed to let me join the team as a favour.

The team was harvesting a parcel of old vines some way from the château.  The grape harvesting machine stands high, like a tall spindly legged tractor, straddling the row of vines.  As it proceeds down the row, grapes are stripped from their bunches, the vines thrash about and broken leaves whirl into the air.  It's not a gentle process but it's quick, so the grapes can be picked and used in peak condition.  The job this morning was to follow the machine and pick any of the precious old vine grapes that had been left behind by the machine.

Old grape vines are a mixed blessing; the juice they produce has a richer and more concentrated flavour but yields are low and the vines are thick and brittle.  The harvesting machines are quite rough with the vines, so old vines often need special care and sometimes hand picking. 

At mid-day we all returned to the château for lunch; baguettes, cheese and ham washed down with Château Rousselle 2008.  From the first sip it seemed surreal to drink such a good wine to accompany a hurried working picnic lunch.

I spent the afternoon on the sorting table – a conveyor belt from which any remaining leaves and stalks are picked out by hand before the grapes are crushed.  At the end of the day, after cleaning all the equipment, Vincent agreed to meet me on Saturday morning to show me the work that goes on in the cellar to make the wine and show me how different it is from the traditional image of Bordeaux wine making.

Over the weekend I was, fortunately, able to make myself more useful.  All the regular staff, who had been harvesting all week, had taken the weekend off, and Vincent was planning to work alone, apart from a brief visit from his flamboyant wine making advisor Olivier.

Olivier's visit changed everyone's plans for the weekend. The 2010 vintage, he said, is a vintage for the worker, not the lazy man.  The hot dry summer has produced a concentrated juice which is going to ferment quickly into an unusually strong wine (14.5%).  When the alcohol levels get too high it is no longer possible to extract the desirable compounds from the grape skins, so extra effort early on will show in the finished wine.

He advised Vincent to empty the juice out of every vat each day, leaving the floating cap of grape skins and pips behind, then to pump it back on top of the skins as quickly as possible, so that the cap is broken up and mixed, and as much colour and flavour as possible extracted from the skins.

So on Saturday and Sunday the two of us spent hours elbow deep in grape juice clearing strainers,  dragging hoses, hauling buckets of grape skins up ladders, cleaning equipment and taking care not to spill a precious drop (yields are down this year, after a dry summer).

Anyone who's tried wine making at home would be surprised by how this process works.  You don't need to be gentle with this stuff.  While everything was kept clean, there's no need to sterilise equipment or protect the fermenting juice from the air.  This is not like coaxing a reluctant demijohn of blackberries into fermentation.  This yeast is is feisty stuff, eager to devour the juice.  A big part of the wine maker's job is to try to slow down the alcoholic fermentation, so that more subtle flavours can develop.  The tops of the vats are open to the air, but as you peer into them from the top of the ladder you're faced with an eye-watering blast of alcohol and concentrated grape flavours.    This yeast is more than a match for any bacteria that might drop in wanting to make vinegar; the vapours were more like what I would have expected from new brandy than from wine.

In other ways it's delicate and subtle.  The difference between an OK wine and a great one comes from effort and attention to detail; nursing those tired old vines through another harvest, picking out those bitter green stalks, extra extraction on a Saturday afternoon when your staff are resting.

Every day Vincent records the specific gravity and temperature of the juice, and tastes it.  Every day the SG drops as the sugar is fermented away, and it's a constant struggle to keep the temperature under control to balance the heat of the fermentation.  Every day the flavour of each vat changes; from cloyingly sweet to rich and jammy to something starting to resemble wine.

On the Sunday evening I left Château Rousselle to its work, with a box of six bottles to accompany us on our journeys.  Over the next week the remaining vats will be filled, and within a couple of weeks will have reached their full alcoholic strength.  After that, the juice will be transferred to concrete vats for a quieter few weeks, during which it will undergo the mysterious process of malo-lactic fermentation.  After that comes months of further maturation, some of it in French oak barrels, some of it in American oak, and finally bottling and sale. 

Berry Bros & Rudd sell Château Rousselle in the UK.  If I can possibly scrape together £20 on my return, I'll be buying at least one bottle of Château Rousselle 2010.  I was there at the beginning and I have to find out how this story ends.

After that we headed across the Gironde to the Médoc and its astonishing sandy beaches.  Since then we have been making our way slowly south down the west coast towards the Spanish border.

Blogging as it should be done?

Since we're staying on a luxurious campsite (Camping Le Capeyrou, Beynac) with wifi on tap, we can tell it as it happens.  Tomorrow we head back to the kiwi farm, where there's no wifi on tap (or even a tap) so we may go quiet again for a while.  The staff at Le Capeyrou have spent today cleaning the furniture on the terrace, ready to pack up for the winter, they close tomorrow.  Finding campsites is going to become more and more difficult.

We woke today to chilly mist, which was gradually burnt off by the sun, the temperature rising rapidly until Scooby was sitting melting in a sunbeam, his favourite thing.  The castle on the crag overlooking the site suddenly appeared in the middle of the sky, very dramatically.  I'm not used to my horizons being that far above me.

We drove into Sarlat for market day.  It is a fabulous old mediaeval city and a fabulous market, with lots of Perigord duck and goose products, truffles and walnuts, but also proper gnarly vegetables and good fish.  We bought a chunk of pumpkin and some other veg, then miscalculated and spent a fortune on a block of cheese.  Half the voices in the market were English or American, this region is something of a theme park.

Caught up on chores, did some washing, took advantage of the wifi to do some emailing, some administration and finally submit my tax return.  Unfortunately, the day we have wifi is the day when the least interesting stuff happens!

Further south ... red wine country

Real trouble keeping up with the blog … technology has been getting in the way and things keep happening!  To have any chance of catching up we'll have to skip over our meander down through the Vendee and Charente, and jump straight to Blaye.

In 2007 we'd made our second, more determined attempt to get to Bordeaux and find out what all the fuss was about.  By a happy accident we stayed in the Villa Saint Simon in Blaye – where we had a fantastic welcome from the oenophile South African proprietor, Les Kellen.  He introduced us to his favourite local chateaux, the sort of places that make the wine that the region is famous for, at a reasonable price (and which seems to all be swallowed up by the domestic French market, leaving the dross and the £40 clarets for the Brits, who naturally turn to the Hunter Valley instead).

Blaye is a small town dominated by a spectacular seventeenth century fort, built by the famous (in France anyway) military architect Vauban on the orders of King Louis the Fourteenth.  It was intended to keep the British out, but these days everyone is welcome to squeeze in through a series of granite gateways and stay on the municipal campsite right inside the battlements.

Big, beautiful, blue, but not too big, not quite

We arrived on 20th, and once we'd checked in and found ourselves a plot with a fabulous view over the Gironde estuary we walked back into Blaye to say 'Hi' to Les.  A quick visit became a long evening of drinking wine and catching up with his many projects; wine tours, wine dealing, a new art gallery in the street behind Villa Saint Simon, a share in a vineyard and a derelict kiwi fruit farm which he plans to turn into an eco-resort.

On 22nd we moved to the kiwi farm for a couple of days of solitude next to the lake amongst the overgrown kiwi fruit vines, enjoying the company of the friendly resident geese and the coypu family and reading a MBA thesis on the eco-village project.

On 24th we headed off again to have a look at the Dordogne, making our way to Perigeaux, Brive Le Galliarde and Rocamadour. 

This post does our travels no justice, but is dedicated to everyone to whom we gave promises to tell them what we were doing! To bring it right up to date, it's 28th September and we're having a delicious lunch in the WiFi equipped La Table du Marais restaurant overlooking the lake in Groléjac (Scooby is sleeping underneath the table - when we ask if we can bring him into a restaurant we are usually met with a surprised expression and 'Bien sur, pas de probleme!').

Pushing south, wine country

13th September 2010
After a couple of days at 'Les Vikings' (a holiday park in Barneville-Cartaret) we headed down the coast towards Granville, where we'd stayed in the hot summer of 2003, and which we remembered fondly.  When we eventually found the aire at Pointe De Roc it was completely full, so we headed off down the coast to find another place to stay.

As we passed the youth hostel by the port we saw a dozen motorhomes parked up in a free carpark, so turned in and joined them.  In addition to the aires and France Passion sites, camping caristes in France also seem to benefit from the French instinct that if something's not expressly forbidden it's allowed, and if it is expressly forbidden it's probably allowed anyway, or ought to be.

We settled in, filled up with water from the free tap and walked to the port to eat on the terrace at La Phare, where we'd eaten last time.  In the morning, as we returned from another trip into town to buy fish, we met the Police Municipal whowere going from van to van politely asking people to move on.  They'd even been considerate enough to leave it until almost mid day to start the evictions.

14th September 2010
Leaving Granville a little damp and breezy, we set off for a 180km push south on the autoroutes, looking for the sun.  As we approached Nantes we saw fields of sunflowers and vineyards for the first time, the sun began to shine strongly and there was a  real feeling of having crossed a threshold.  This felt like The South.

Tonight's stop was another France Passion site, the Domaine de la Pichonière in Haute Goulaine, where the vendage was in full swing.  Here Isabelle and Michel Olivier grow muscadet and gamay grapes which go to make the muscadet sur lie that the area is best known for, but also, red, rosé and mousseux wine.

The vendage was in full swing, with trailer loads of grapes pulling into the farmyard.  The grape presses were throbbing and the air was heavy with the sweet syrupy smell of fermenting fruit.  Inspite of all the activity Mme Olivier took the time to welcome us and led us on her bike to a plot of grass at the front of the house where we could camp.  Once we'd settled in, she showed us her products and treated us to some generous samples.  Inevitably we left with our arms full.

 At the far end of the vineyard top-heavy tractors, tall and spindly like Salvador Dali elephants, were harvesting the grapes which hung in full heavy bunches on the vines. 

Back in the camping car we filleted and fried our Granville gurnard with boiled potatoes and green beans, and ate outside in the  late evening sunshine.

First week on the road

Quite a lot to catch up with, as we've not had much access to the internet...

4 September 2010
First stop Camping Mont Des Bruyères, Saint Amand-les-Eaux.  A beautiful quiet site set in acres of beechwood, an ideal spot to catch our breath and repack (we weren't as well prepared as we might have been).

It's situated in Nord Pas De Calais, not far from the Belgian border, an unfashionable corner of France that Britons tend to pass through on their way to somewhere more sunny, and French people tend to overlook.  The stereotypical view of this area in France seems to be that it's a cold, grey, dark place where it always rains, inhabited by people (called Chi'tis) with peculiar accents who live on beer, chips, iron and coal.  Somewhere, in other words, where a Welshman might feel at home!

Unlike Wales, it's flat; on the same flat plain as Jacques Brel's 'Plat Pays'.  The Mont Des Bruyères is the tallest thing for miles, but not tall enough to get good TV reception or to show above the treetops. Unlike Wales, they eat mussels with their chips and spell saveloy 'cervelau'. It also has towns full of beautiful seventeenth century gabled buildings, endless beaches of fine pale sand and huge silent forests of beech, oak and hazel.

Recently there seems to have been something of a good-humoured 'Chi'ti Pride' movement.  There's Chi'ti beer, Chi'ti postcards and in 2009 a hit film 'Bienvenue Chez Les Chi'tis'.  We watched the film on DVD while we were there.  It was good fun, but as much a defence or advertisement of the region as anything else.  I've got mixed feelings about their attempts to encourage tourism, it is a great place just as it is.

… and another thought... Calais was English until the reign of Mary Tudor.  How much of the surrounding territory was ruled by the Tudors?  Was it culturally English or culturally French? Could the Chi'tis be descended from Britons stranded by the French reconquest of the region?  Does that history explain any of their distinctive language or accent?  For example their local word 'bray' means 'to cry'.  English donkeys still bray, but it's not unimaginable that it might be a surviving scrap of Tudor slang.  If anyone reads this blog, does anyone know?

7 December 2010
Second stop, Camping Les Praries, Le Crotoy, on the bay of the Somme.  Another region with an image problem; “We went camping, it was like the Somme”.

In our experience, 'like the Somme' means gentle hills and wooded valleys, low painted houses, some half timbered, pear and apple orchards with neat rows of tiny trees heavy with fruit.  On the other hand, it did start to rain heavily during our first night and intermittently during the next day.  It wouldn't have taken much artillery fire to turn the whole landscape into mud.

Le Crotoy is a genteel seaside town.  The town centre is ancient (Joan of Arc spent some time in prison here) but much of the town seems to have been built in the early years of the twentieth century – a lot of ornate seaside villas with turrets and coloured tiles.  It faces the broad muddy bay of the Somme estuary, a rich environment for shellfish and birds. 

Like all French seaside resorts they make the most of their local produce, every restaurant proudly sells D.O.C. Saltmarsh (pré saleé) lamb, local mussels (moules), whelks (bulots), brown shrimp (crevettes grises), samphire (salicornes) and various fish.  Try finding a menu like that in Crofty.

The esplanade area, since last April, has been plastered in signs banning dogs from the beach, and is also closed to motorhomes, so not a great welcome for us.  We took local advice and headed to the seaward end where Scooby could run free and no-one seemed to mind.

While we were on the beach, a parade of tractors appeared heading inland, trailers laden with sacks of cockles, cockle pickers and bicycles.  A year sitting opposite the Environment Agency Wales fisheries  team has given me a keen interest in the cockle industry, and I'm pretty confident that bikes have not been incorporated into the harvesting system in Wales.

On the evening of 7th we celebrated Stella's birthday with a delicious meal in Restaurant Mado, on the waterfront overlooking the port.  After the meal I mentioned to the waiter that I'd seen the cockle pickers and was surprised that cockles didn't feature on the menus.  He explained that the artisan collectors sell the cockles directly to the public from their doorsteps.  An unlikely story, given the quantities we'd seen landed.  My suspicious were confirmed as we left the town, when we saw a fleet of Galician trucks parked up by the cockle pickers' tractors.  The Spanish appreciate cockles more than the French and will pay higher prices, but still it's surprising that they aren't in the restaurants locally.

9 September 2010
France has an extensive network of free or cheap places where people can stay the night in a motorhome.  These areas aren't available for people in tents or caravans, but due to a happy accident of history, or clumsy drafting of legislation, sleeping in your motorhome is treated the same, legally, as dozing off in your car.  Local authorities, hoping to bring in some tourism revenue, make a real effort to be welcoming, and often provide a place to empty waste water and refill freshwater tanks, sometimes even a place to plug in and recharge batteries.

Our first 'Aire de stationment' was at Honfleur, and what an aire it was.  Motorhomes of all nations (except Bhutan, obviously) stretched as far as we could see.  There must have been well over a hundred.  Honfleur charges 9 euros a night, but for that you get waste disposal, fresh water and free electricity.  It's not a luxurious environment, but it's good value.

 ... it helps to have a blue one.

We walked a few minutes into Honfleur, where smart shops surround the old harbour basin, and smart people parade around looking at the smart yachts.  We found a sunny table and bought a couple of beers which ate up all the money we'd saved by staying on the aire.  Still good value.

10 September 2010
If free aires de stationment weren't enough, in France the campingcariste is also treated to the France Passion scheme, under which landowners let motorhome owners stay on their land for free.  They hope to sell some of their produce to the visitors, but there's no obligation to buy.

We headed  for Les Vergers de Ducy, an organic cider farm near Bayeux, expecting something a bit rustic and Worzel-ish.  What we found was an immaculate farm yard surrounded by beautiful old buildings where a visiting Belgian coach party was tasting the produce.  The ambience was much more like a wine chateau than a normal farm. In addition to several grades of cider, they make several grades of calvados (we bought some of the ten year old), apple jelly, honey, creme de calvados, pommeau (calvados and apple juice aperitif). I can't imagine anyone leaves empty handed.

We parked up on the edge of the orchard; a glorious quiet location, surrounded by this year's crop (to be harvested next month).  The apples were surprisingly imperfect, but presumably the aesthtic qualities don't matter when you're going to mash them up for the juice.  Certainly the product couldn't be faulted; clear, sparkling with a complex appley flavour.  A world away from Cripple Cock.

Voyage of the Big Blue Van - Embarkation

Being the chronicle of the voyages of Richard, Stella and Scooby.

Being the tale of how they forsook their positions, car-booted their possessions and set forth in search of adventure in foreign lands.

Being the record of their preparations, equipment, victuals & C.