Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Uzès & Montpellier - 12th May

Today we shifted house to Carcassonne with details about the city to follow on another day.
The trip is supposed to have taken five hours however due to sightseeing, protests, weather, food consumption, book-fairs and little country roads it took us 11 hours.

Today’s blog is based on waypoints, the geocaching term for stages.

• Waypoint 1 - Bagnols-sur-Ceze; we stopped at a small bakery which had an impressive display of goods. Unfortunately the quiches had no labels and the cashier had no English so she fetched the English speaking dish-hand, who said that just about every quiche was fish; I’m not sure fish was the word she was wanting because one was clearly spinach
• Waypoint 2 - Uzès ; Uzès was once home to New Zealander Peta Mathias, chef, writer, presenter etc. She now lives back in Auckland and does cooking classes and food tours overseas, currently in Morocco. We stopped in town and did a quick tour of the old city which is full of tourists, but you can tell by the great vibe that it is a beautiful place to have a second home, hint. The property below has business income, which would be essential as we spent a small fortune on lunch provisions, parking and tourist treats

• Waypoint 3 - Sommieres; We parked up just of town for lunch, under the shade of a tree and views of vineyards
• Waypoint 4 - Montpellier: We visited a market in the old part of Montpellier in 2007, so this time we returned, again to the old part and did the touristy thing. We checked out the shops, the aqueduct, Peyrou gate, square, and promenade, plus the Arc de Triomphe – every touristy city in this area has one, it’s just the age of them that varies. We got an added bonus, a free book fair with authors in attendance; entry required my bag to be searched with Napoleon in it, so I got a strange look from the security.
  
  Around the other side of town the nurses were having a protest march about the raising of the retirement age. You can’t see in this photo but there were a lot of police in attendance.
  
  Getting out of Montpellier took over half an hour as not only did the skies open up and flood the streets but there were so many road-works that we had to change to the second more intuitive GPS that predicts such events
• Waypoint 5 - The Supermarket: We weren’t far from our final destination so we stopped off at the supermarket which has its own off and on ramp from/to the motorway. Unfortunately we had left Montelimar’s Mediterranean temperatures and weren’t dressed for the cold chilly weather; I'm pretty sure we are closer to the equator, not further from it...
• Waypoint 6 - Carcassonne: not to be confused with places of the same name which only have one 's' or 'n' in them.

Cheese experience No.21 - Reblochon: I finally found some Reblochon, at a decent price, at the supermarket. Reblochon is known as the cheese born of tax evasion; 'la rebloche' = the petit theft & 'reblocher' = to pinch the udder a second time.
In the 13th century peasants were taxed based on milk production with the landlord/tax collector visiting periodically to monitor the yield. The farmer stopped milking before the cows were dry - once the tax collector had been and gone he did a second milking, getting a smaller but richer quality of milk which he used to make cheese for the family.
NB the cheese package got ripped open before the late night photo was taken, it was delicious.