Towards the land of popes and kings
In our last post we alluded to the wheels threatening to fall off our trip. That may have been a little melodramatic - I mean, we're in France, we're on holiday - how bad can things possibly get? Anyway we thought we'd inject a little drama into the blog to keep everyone on the edge of their seats.
The trouble began as we finished off our time in Lyon. This was the last of the 'planned' portion of the first half of the trip; from here we knew we had to be in Spain in some 14 or 15 days time, but aside from that the most planning we'd done was draw a squiggly line on the map between Lyon and San Sebastian, and labelled it 'Doin' Fun Stuff'.
So it was that we found ourselves on our last morning in Lyon thinking, hmm, where to now?
We had been wanting to do a hike in the mountains at some point, and with the Alps tantalisingly close, we set our sights on a small mountain town on the side of a little lake called Lake Annecy. From the map it looked beautiful, with some nice winding roads and access to the mountains. (Mistake #1).
So, we had a look through Airbnb (our go-to resource for most of our accommodation this trip) and found what looked like a cute little flat pretty near the lake, with a little patio, Wi-fi and bicycles. Wow! Great. We figured we'd book it for three nights - give ourselves a chance to have a bit of a look around. (Mistake #2).
Packed the car, jumped on he Autoroute and in an hour and a half we were out of Lyon and in the Alps! Such is the magic of Europe - this place is tiny. Arriving in Lake Annecy, we very quickly realised that yes, the town is as beautiful as the pictures and yes, the lake is lovely. Unfortunately so had seemingly half of France and a good number of Germans and Swiss as well. The place was rammed.
The little flat we'd rented was lovely, but unfortunately the tyres on the bikes were flat, and the internet was down. Oh. My. God. Well, not to worry - let's grab a bottle of wine, cheese, baguette, our trusty Emirates blanket, and head down to the lake and soak up the atmosphere.
And it was lovely. Despite the fact that there was no beach and really no place to sit except to perch on sort of a grassy bank on the edge of the path, the water didn't actually look that inviting, and there were people everywhere.... Well, at least the wine was chilled and the view of the mountains was nice. We can make this work, right?
Yeah, not really. We're way too spoiled in Sydney with our beaches and (generally) the lack of crowds. And the fact that we couldn't even get on the 'net to plan our hikes, upload our photos or write this very blog meant that by morning, the benefit of spending twenty years together meant that we didn't even need to say anything to each other. We just packed our things back in to the car, and started driving.
Such was our haste to escape European summer retreat hell, that we STILL had no plans. But at the very least this had helped us to focus our thinking. We at least now knew where we didn't want to be, and a glimmer of what we did want to be doing. Wine tasting, culture, history, golf. Leave the beaches for when we're back in Australia. So we retraced our steps down the Autoroute, and at Lyon turned left and headed south down the Rhone.
After visiting a rather mediocre Modern Art Museum in St. Etienne, we continued south through a national park (Le Parc Naturel Regional do Pilat) which gave a great panoramic view of the Rhone Valley.
That evening found us in Tournon (thank you Gourmet Traveller!), where we were treated to two amazing wine tasting experiences - at the second place we sat for two hours chatting with the wine-taster-lady and another random wine-tastee-lady about all sorts of things. Mostly in French, so I'm not actually sure what we were talking about, but boy it was fun. And the wine was fantastic - we learned an awful lot about Northern Rhone wine. For example, the Syrah grape is prominent; the right bank is granite and steep, the left bank is flat and clay. This all seemed really vital information at the time.
It's hard to see on this photo by these vines are planted on very steep hills which mean seriously hard yakka for the grape pickers.
This rather ad hoc random day turned out to be fantastic. And we thought of it, and the next few days, as 'bonus days' that we would have otherwise lost in the wilderness of that lake.
So even though we still didn't have any firm plans the next morning, it was still with light hearts that we left Tournon and continued south to a town called Cornas, where we'd been assured by our wine tasting lady the previous night, we would be able to do some further tasting at the cellar doors, and find a nice BnB to stay. Now, either my French is worse than I thought, or everyone in Cornas had headed to Lake Annecy, because there was NOONE in town. Aside from some very enthusiastic people in the Information office, who seemed a little confused as to why we were there, given everything was closed. Sigh. Wheels are wobbling! It was now 4 in the afternoon, the few BnB's that we'd managed to find online had all failed to respond and we were sitting in an abandoned parking lot weighing up our options.
And then (another) miracle. We realised that with our southwards march, we were less than an hour's drive from the land of popes and kings, Avignon. We quickly rattled off a few messages to Airbnb hosts in Avignon, and meanwhile set off on our way. By the time we arrived we'd secured a beautiful little flat just outside the historic city walls. And with our first wander into town we realised we'd stumbled across something right up our alley - the Avignon Off! Festival. But perhaps we'd better leave that for another post.
