Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Le Puy-en-Velay - 21st June

Le Puy En-Velay is known as the City of the Virgin, but for tonight it will be known as the City of Expensive American Beer. A large beer was 2€ in Portugal, 4€ in Spain, 5€ in Carcassonne, but in Le Puy it was 9€ (NZ$16.50).

Anyway moving on, there will be no more beers for Roger at that café; he had earned the beer for the 9.00am to 6.30pm epic drive from Cahors to Le Puy.

After stopping at Figeac for morning tea we travelled onto Aurillac. We had 2¼ hours free parking to see the sights and have a lasagne lunch. If the menu writing had been clearer I would have had a shrimp cocktail, how 1970s.

Among many other significant historic events that took place here one is that Napoleon rode into town, after his battle in Russia, on his horse Cantal, named after the local area because it came from here. We went in search of a statue and ended up at the Tourism Office.

The lady told us it was just a story and we could go to the park down the road and view the place where the old military stables once stood.

Essence of France Photo Challenge No.24 - Napoleon He did have a horse named after the area and was a great military leader on land, but definitely not at sea. So we took a photo of our Napoleon with the military stables sign, Haras translates to ‘Stud’. France can’t deny that Napoleon did a lot for the country; most places do embrace their Napoleonic history and name streets, landmarks, buildings and other items such as food after him. Mainly they are on the routes he would have travelled.

Our other adventures in Aurillac included a church visit while the tourism office finished their 2 hour lunch, a tour of the chateau gardens and a geocache at the volcano museum.

Our third stop for the day was to do a cheese-related geocache in Saint-Bonnet-de-Salers at a cheese factory.
Cheese Experience No.61 - The Cheese Factory The kind lady inside, with no English, showed us how to do a self-guided tour of the factory, gave us a tasting session and sold us some reasonably priced cheese produced onsite from the milk of the local 'Salers' breed of cows.

The following photo of the maturing cheese was taken through a window of a temperature controlled room. There were 1,000 of these large barrel-shaped cheeses (fourmes).[Ed: Counted by an accountant from Hawkes Bay]

The next photo shows how milk is made; for the French they have painted a nappy on the calf and put a dummy in its mouth to clarify it is a baby cow and not just petite.

The third photo is the cheese factory and shop.

From the cheese factory we drove through mountainous volcanic country, consisting of valleys and massifs, which are plateaus lying over 600metres above sea level, in the Cantal area with the highest being at 1800metres. You can walk up the Puy Mary near the top of the range however they wanted 4€ to park and visit.

Our photo was taken slightly downhill, free-parked in the middle of the road as the French do.

We arrived in Le Puy En-Velay only to find the music festival had kicked off and all of its 19,000 residents, plus tourists were parked in town and celebrating.
June 21st is the annual French National Music Day; all the towns we went through today and yesterday had signs indicating the streets would be closed. Even in 2018 the 21st of June was music festival day.

In our hunt to find tea tonight we found over 6 different bands and 3 dance groups. We had tapas near the quieter dancers and then went and had our eardrums blown out by the rappers.