Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Gimont - 16th June

Nearly two months into our holiday and the lush green paddocks that we first saw when we arrived have nicely browned off in the daily 30degree heat.

We are gearing up for the weekend, so today we are having a quiet day of geocaching in the villages of Gimont and Saint-André. Gimont is a small town of 3,000 inhabitants with a large red brick cathedral. We have visited towns two hours north and south previously and they all have the same red brick called a Foraine brick (see below), they are wider and flatter than a normal brick. The colour comes from the clay found in the basins of the Tarn and the Garonne Rivers. Because of its abundance in years passed it was a common construction material in the towns built along these valleys.

Gimont’s cathedral is in the distance, taken from our lunch cemetery. Don’t judge; they provide free seats and a rubbish bin. You can also guarantee none of the people around you will be chatting endlessly or smoking, possibly as they did in the past and that is why they now rest here.

A few minutes out of Gimont is Cahuzac, a smaller village with 3 caches, and a shop that sells drinks, at very reasonable prices, to geocachers in 32degree heat. The first cache was at a church; the dummies couldn’t find it, so we visited the church and moved on.

The second cache was near a garden centre; ‘Newton’ was the hint. we looked up and there it was suspended from a rope which you had to unwind to lower the cache

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Upon returning to the car, one of the Garden Centre guys asked us if we found the 'Newton' cache and, after a long discussion, he advised he was the owner. He was amazed we didn’t find his church cache, and described how to find it, one out of four words were English and there were lots of hand signals.
Back we returned to the church and voilà, a sneaky hide was soon in hand.

Third cache was at the 12th century abbey, which is now somebody’s barn and perimeter fence for their sunflower crop.

Last cache of the day was at Saint-André, you can fool any nosey parker by making a cache look like a specimen jar in a bird box.

Cheese Experience No.56 - Force-Feeding This area is famous for its Foie Gras, in simple terminology it's pâté made from the liver of a force-fed goose or duck. As we are going out of town for a few days, we force-fed ourselves all of our goat cheese so that we don’t come home to the smell of old socks in the fridge.