Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Grignan - 8th May

VE Day: In true French holiday fashion we stayed home and didn’t leave the house until 2.00pm when we knew the tourist attractions would be open in Grignan. This is the only town on our list to visit today because it has a 7-stage multi-cache which could take us to all the sites of the Chateau on the hill.
Several powerful families in the area owned the chateau from around the year 1030. Each family extended the chateau, added buildings like the chapel and turned the fortress into a luxurious residence. However, being heirless, the owners bequeathed the chateau to their nephews which started the downhill spiral of the chateau being left in ruins by the 17th century.
A lady brought it in 1912 spent a lot of money restoring it, however she died with no heir and left it to her nephews who weren’t interested in it so also let it go to ruin.
The local authority purchased it 42 years after her death for tourism purposes. Moral of the story don’t leave your chateau to your ungrateful nephews.

We walked the town, saw the chateau, the Catholic Church, the rose gardens, the ice cream shop and left without going past stage 1 of the multi-cache because we don’t break geocaching etiquette and enter people’s private property; unlike other finders of the cache who noted in their log it was wrong but still did it.

Next tourist attraction was the Village Provencal Miniature which translates into English as the Miniature Provencal Village. It is a display of several little village scenes based on films made in France in the mid 20th century. Quite a few of the scenes are from the film series (based on a book) The Little World of Don Camillo, which looks like it would have been an entertaining movie in its day as it featured an opinionated priest and a dodgy communist mayor during WWII.

Cheese Experience No.17 - Cheese and Literature: The prominent statue at the Chateau was of famous French writer Marquise de Sevigne. Her son-in-law inherited the chateau and let it go to ruins in the 17th century.
Literature also featured in our miniature village tour with the scenes based mainly on film adaptations of books. If you are into books and cheese there is a collection of books called The Cheese Shop Mystery Series, by Avery Aames. They include "Gouda as Death" and "Clobbered by Camembert"; who knew cheese could be so deadly, especially a soft cheese like camembert.