Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Montélimar - 9th May

Montélimar - Rain was predicted for today so we decided to have a home day and explore Montélimar between showers. Unlike Nelson and Auckland, a rain warning means it will be hot until 2.00pm and then there will be very light drizzle for ten minute periods each hour.

Montélimar has a population of 39,000 and also 57,000, how does that work, well it’s kind of confusing. A city is called a commune, if there is a housing area within 200 metres of the city and it has more than 2000 inhabitants then at is a commune in itself but forms part of the bigger neighbouring commune for the urban area population count.
As a NZ example; Napier was a commune and Taradale was a commune, they were once separated by farm land and had their own mayors. At some time the gap lessened, Taradale remained a commune but became part of urban Napier, in other words a suburb.
Paris has 411 communes in its urban area, not sure I’d like to be a Postie as most communes repeat street names, France lives in the past and loves to name everything after Napoleon, King Louis I to XVIII, and World War events. A normal GPS instruction is “turn left down Rue du 11 November 1918 and then right onto Rue du Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte the third.

Montélimar was once a fortified city controlled by the family of Adhémar de Monteil, Latin = Montilium Adhemari , modern day = Montélimar. If you thought the name Adhemar sounds familiar he was the dark knight or antagonist in the movie A Knight’s Tale. However the real Adhemar was a Bishop and a leader in the First Crusade to the Holy Land.
Historically Montélimar was freed of the Adhémar family; the bridges and others buildings destroyed in Wars of Religion and eventually the walls of the gated city were removed. Many things are still called Adhémar in the area, more confusingly the chateau which goes by the name of Montélimar and also by the name of Adhémar.
We visited the gardens, the chateau, the chapel that didn’t exist, a pub Napoleon stayed at, the bakery and the sewing shop where the English speaking lady tightly controls the cottons out the back of the shop.

Today’s WTF photos are: the handy towels at our apartment, a weird oversized tin-can feature for a local hotel, men at work annoying geocachers (must be 2.00pm) and lastly a random Kiwi on skis in the middle of a round-about.

Cheese Experience No.17 - Tartiflette (heart attack on a plate) The French believe strongly in the marriage of cheese and potato for gastronomy perfection. Most restaurants offer this dish which contains layers of: potato sliced or diced fried in butter for colour and crunch, onions also fried, lardons (pig fat), and large slices of Reblochon cheese baked on top. Ours is the poor man’s version because the cheese quantity would kill us, both fat-wise and price-wise; Reblochon cheese is expensive. The photo shows his and hers Tartiflette, mine has thin slices of Maroilles on top and Roger’s a small amount of crumbled blue cheese, no butter added.