Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Alba-la-Romaine/Vogüé/Balazuc - 4th May

Today’s journey and geocaches focused on France’s beautiful small villages in Ardèche; there are hundreds and we are visiting three of them this afternoon. We had a late start due to website technical issues and the picky scribe [Ed: I don’t remember calling her a scribe], so by time we got to our first destination of Alba-la-Romaine the town had shut and wasn’t reopening until 3.00pm. We gave ourselves a tour of the village, established in the Middle Ages, which had interesting stone houses with underpasses and obscure entranceways. Image below shows a sundial - the photo was taken at 2pm...

We stumbled across a café, conceded to the French way of life and stopped for a proper meal in the middle of the day. In two hours you can get home from work, after picking up the kids and a baguette, and have a relaxing lunch before going back to work. We thought we would just have some frites, but that is not considered a proper lunch and the chef had run out of potatoes. The waitress talked us into galette; she asked the diners next to us what a galette was in English and they decided it was "crap", their English pronunciation of crêpe. Our galette was a pancake made with buckwheat flour and folded around a savoury filling of ham, poached egg and emmental cheese. Please note Mother: from the photos below lunch came with lettuce and I ate all of mine even though it had burnt garlic crumbs on it.

We didn’t do the planned geocache here as you needed to get into the Roman ruins; it was a combination of not wanting to pay to see yet another pile of rocks and the fact it isn’t open on Thursday.
Next small town was Vogüé, another from the Middle Ages, it took us a while to work out that you can only go in one end of town by bridge and out the other end by bridge. The main road through town has been reduced to one way for safety reasons and one lane as the cafes have claimed half the road for seating.

We did 2 caches based around Saint Cerice and a little chapel called Gleysette, rebuilt through private and public funding for 95,000€.

Geocaching madness at its finest, I won’t pay to see a pile of Roman stones but I will walk up a hill in jandals and jeans in the searing heat, it was 36.8C at the top.
And what was there besides a little Tupperware container? Nothing but a pile of rocks.

Vogue’s other geocache was a bridge with interesting history. It has three stone spans and the rest is metal. Various locals have been trying to build the bridge since 1456 but it either never got completed or it was washed away in a storm. When they finally got it completed they blew it up in WWII to stop the Germans crossing it. When it was restored it was one lane, so for safety reasons they made the bridge and the whole town one way. Bloody annoying if you forget something when going into the big city as you would have to go all the way down the motorway to get back in the other end of town. We left town via the ice cream shop and the Catholic Church for air-conditioning. Picture is of the bridge as it was in 1944.

Balazuc, another Middle Ages town on a river and just as impressive as the other two we visited today. We did two caches here based on an old chapel and a bridge, every small town in this area has a working bridge or two from the Middle Ages.

Cheese Experience No.13 - Cheese and fridge storage. We still have leftover cheese in the fridge which is not a no no in France, however they advise that it should be brought up to room temperature before serving. If you don’t use it all wrap it back up in the original wrapper to avoid it drying out. Preferably not in plastic or an airtight plastic container as it won’t be able to breathe and will promote the growth of unpalatable white mould. Also put it in the vegetable crisper, not in the door, to keep it tasty.