Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Vaison-la-Romaine - 3rd May

After the daily bread purchase from the village of Suze La Rousse, big Chateau (photo below), thanks for the free carpark, we headed off to Vaison La Romaine. The town of Vaison La Romaine has medieval and roman history, so to cover all the main features we attempted to do a geocache at each one.

Geocache 1: 12th century Comtal Chateau, the feudal castle of Raymond V Count of Toulouse, a Crusader and son in-law of a king. A feudal castle belongs to a family of nobility and was placed strategically to protect them. It didn’t need to be large because they weren’t trying to protect a whole village. Raymond’s family were interesting in many ways, his marriage was annulled because it was found he married within prohibited degrees. Raymond’s son, also called Raymond, had 6 wives, one being Richard the Lion Heart's sister - two of the wives later thought that being a nun was a better option.
The Castle was built on rock at the top of the hill above the medieval town of Vaison La Romaine; no slippery Nelson slopes here. We discovered the geocache and that if you drive ¼ the way up and walk down the other side you still have to walk up to the car, no mean feat in 30.5deg temperatures. The header photo is the chateau looking up from the old chapel at ground level.

The Roman Bridge: No cache near the bridge but there was a war memorial.

Geocaches 2 & 3 Old Chapel and Roman Ruins, despite being 32.5deg both were found and as a bonus you get to walk through the ruins for free, no archaeological police or profiteers in sight.

Geocache 4 Ancient theatre or amphitheatre - suffering from heat exhaustion we decided to spend our Euros on a drink and not NZ$18 each to see some old rock seats. We did however find a geocache near the free library and other books lying around town with “adopt a free book” sticker on them.

Two other photos from today:
1) the Google Maps car that tried to block us in a small street and then followed us to lunch out of town
2) a stone, just like they have in NZ, where you can either collect them or move them on. The message says Sharing “find my pebble 84”. 84 is the Department of Vaucluse, F1 is a code used by the lady who painted it; she likes to drop 5 a day just for the entertainment of others.

Cheese Experience No.12 Itineraire des Fromages or Cheese maps. Vaison La Romaine is known for olives, honey and lavender, not cheese. Yesterday we posted a large billboard picture of a cheese map, not so handy if you are on the move and want to know what the local cheese is. So you can do one of two things, get a book or search the internet for a cheese map, or secondly go to the local agricultural office who will give you a map listing the addresses of local cheese producers. If you don’t like driving in France they do plenty of expensive cheese tasting tours. I brought my cheese maps from home that tell me what the local cheese is and its history and fortunately for me I also have a cheese loving driver with several GPS’s (you need a few especially when stuck in a narrow medieval one way cobbled street and it tells you to make a U-turn).