France 8

A bit late with the update! Sorry but my roughly weekly schedule for posting has blown out this time, as I write this we enter our last week in France and we are back down at Dominique & Anre’s house. First though, lets go back to the last week or so of our time in Montbard.

First up, some pictures from my walks thru the village, along the canal and the river, something I tried to most days, weather permitting.

We spent more time exploring in various directions, a drive up to Auxerre and a walk thru the old city on a lovely late summer’s day was interesting. We drove back home thru Chablis and Tonnere where we stopped for a very pleasant glass of chardonnay at a bar. The forecast was for a few lovely warm sunny days before the rain returned so we were determined to make the most of it!

Auxerre is notable for the Saint-Etienne Cathedral, originally built about 500AD, it was destroyed by fires between the 9th and 11th century, and rebuilt in the 11th century, then rebuilt in a different style in the 13th century! Its certainly an impressive building!

Our next day of discovery was a drive to Semur-en-Auxois, we drove into the town centre, parked and wandered around the very pretty town. Sal found some good second hand shops to browse thru and when we had finished exploring we decided to drive to the river on the edge of the town as we had packed a picnic lunch of wine, baguette, cheese and pate so we thought the river would be the spot for that. We nearly didnt find the spot because it was very difficult to drive to due to the extremely steep and narrow streets and at one point 2 other cars were backing out because they had decided there was no pathway forward, but we persisted and were rewarded with a view that realised as the most beautiful town we have yet visited in France, what had not been obvious from the town centre above, was just how steep the hill was that rose out of the river side and how beautiful the buildings lining the hill. Again, another piece of our luck that comes from how we travel and our exploratory mindset!

I have split the galleries in two as we took so many photos here!

I made a little video of bits of footage we have shot driving thru the French countryside, some in Semur-en-Auxois, some on the open road and some in other villages.

The amazing weather continued so the next day we packed another picnic and went back to Vezelay to see it in bright sunlight and then had a picnic in the village below, Saint-Père, again on the banks of a river.

The next day was to be the last of the warm, sunny, clear days before the cold and wet set in, so we packed our 3rd picnic in a row and headed off, we got no more than about 7kms and as we were driving thru Fain-Lès-Montbard we saw a sign that there was a boot sale on and then saw the carpark full of people selling their unwanted goods. This is Sal’s idea of heaven so of course we stopped and went on the hunt for bargains! Sal got some nice clothes and we found a beautiful set of a bigger bowl we will use for salads and 8 small dishes we can use for condiments, they are in amazing condition, local porcelain and only cost 10 euro for all of them! I also got a lovely resting spoon for 1 euro!

We then headed for a little tiny village called Foissy-Sasoge, we had found there was an Emmaus site there, part of the RRUSE network, basically these stores are huge second hand stores run to collect donated materials, sort and resell while providing income, jobs, housing and other support to the disadvantaged,

“Emmaüs Dijon, established in 1972, continues the mission initiated by Abbé Pierre, grounded in its four core values: hospitality and support, sustainable development, employment, and housing. As a social enterprise, it is dedicated to promoting social inclusion and solidarity. To employ disadvantaged people and reduce waste, the organisation runs a number of second-hand stores in the region.”

Being a Saturday afternoon, and as we were making our way to the city of Beaune in the heart of Burgundy, we thought we would stop and see if it was worth coming back for a look when it was open. When we arrived we were surprised to see there were some people standing around the building as if it might be open, but there were plastic chains cordoning off the entries, after some discussion in Franglish we discovered they were shut for lunch and opening in 10 minutes, at 2pm!

So we waited around with a quickly growing crowd of people, by 2pm there were about 50 people waiting at the plastic chains, at exactly 2pm an old guy opened the chains, and the whole crowd aged from about 18 to 80, ran furiously across the grounds to jostle for entry to the huge building and sort thru the tons of second hand goods to hunt for a bargain! It was truly comical and unexpected! It was not just the huge building but also a massive outside area filled with second hand stuff.

Sal was once again in her element! Frankly I found it a bit overwhelming, so much stuff, and most of it junk really (although there was still a lot of really nice stuff too)

After lunch we drove up to Beaune and thru some of the other primary Burgundy villages. It was nice to see all the vineyards on the hills surrounding the towns, but we were pretty underwhelmed by Beaune, very touristy and busy. As we drove home we returned thru the same little village where the boot sale was, they had finished up the boot sale but were still selling a sausage in a baguette and a glass of wine or beer so we pulled up for a quick feed!

Monday night saw us back at La Mirabelle for another amazing meal! It was sweet-sad because we knew it would be our last, we were booked into Le Chez Soi for the next night which would be our last in Montbard.

And so it was off to Le Chez Soi for a last meal with Chef Raphael, at first there was only one other table, a couple, another couple came to the door to try and get a table but Raphael told them he was full and not taking any walk ins. You could see the confusion on their faces – they could see there were only 4 people in the restaurant!!

As we suspected another group came in to sit at the 3rd table, they were a group of 6 and as we discovered when we all sang happy birthday,  it was Nathalie’s birthday. This lead to some chat between the 3 tables and when they discovered we were Australian they became very friendly, Bernard & Claire have a niece working in WA and Jean & Nelly have a daughter in Brisbane, from there the conversation in ‘Franglish’ continued! Towards the end of our meal they told us they wanted to sing a song for us and asked us to join them and Raphael was given the job of camera man!

This lead to Bernard asking us to join them all back at his house “for a few drinks”, they live about 75m from the restaurant in a beautiful house at the top of the old village. Who could resist an offer like that!? So we walked up the stairs, round the corner & into their house.

What ensued was an incredible night of hospitality from Bernard & Claire, Jérôme & Nathalie & Jean & Nelly, singing, talking, drinking various local spirits, chatting to their niece on the phone in Australia, and probably much more that we cant remember due to the alcohol content by this time! It was another reminder that our sort of travelling delivers an experience so different to the Farcebork/IG/TikTok tourism. With tourism enough money can buy you the same experience as any other tourist, but no amount of money can buy the sort of experiences we enjoy as travellers. We may have only really stayed in 2 places for 2 months in France, but experiences like this night will stay with us the rest of our lives and remind us just how wonderful people are the world over!

Mind you, the hangover felt it might last the rest of our lives too!! It lead to the decision the next day NOT to leave for the drive back to Dominique & Arne’s. Instead on a drizzly cold day, about lunchtime, I got out of bed and did the walk of shame down town to where we had left the car the night before to pick it up and return to bed!!

So the following day we arrived back in La Sabot after a long day driving, we stopped at a city called Mâcon for lunch and discovered yet another wonderful French city, on the banks of the Saône. Lovely wide streets, beautiful buildings, and a relaxed, happy feel to it. It was nice to be back in Dominique’s kitchen & I enjoyed cooking for all of us again, Lamb Kleftiko one night and beef ribs the next! They have gone away now for 4 days in Austria, so we have the house to ourselves for a few days, the weather has come good again, although its much cooler now. We have just 2 days together when they return and then drive up to Lyon next Sunday to drop the car off and fly out home to Australia.

Just to finish up what has been a very long post, I have been collecting pictures of some of the beautiful cars I have spotted in France, mainly Citroens!