66 miles
A day of two halves - actually if you think about most days are, very few have three. So, better perhaps to write of having had mixed fortunes. It started out well enough, sociable moments beside the WC emptying point, what more could you wish for! Then off we went, heading towards Perpignan.
After yesterday's drama of the Defile de Pierre-Lys, the way today was a breeze. The D117 passes through a broad valley full of vineyards with high limestone cliffs on each side. The road for the most part is well surfaced, wide and straight, so even the driver gets to appreciate the scenery. I began to mull over the autumn colour of the vineyards. As we have moved south, so has autumn, and in a strange way we have been caught in a perpetual Fall, as if time has stood still. However, these past few days have been colder, particularly at night. Now autumn is catching up with us. It's not like an English autumn though, partly because so many of the trees are evergreen, and partly because of the sunny skies, it's a very summery sort of autumn down here. Leaf fall in the vineyards is interesting, because the various kinds of vines change at different times. Because Southern French wines are blended from different types of grapes, then in the fields there is a mixture of types.
Sadly I don't know my Mourvèdre from my Cairigne, but I can see that they look different. Some rows are wholly bereft of foliage, reduced to a series of wizened stumps strung together on wires, like we see in April when we have driven south at Easter. Other rows are still in full leaf, a mixture of yellowy green leaves, with patches of russet brown in-between where the types of vine change. The effect of this is very beautiful, and not something either of us have ever experienced, having spent our working lives tied to school holidays.
As you begin leave the Corbieres, and the AOC signs on the village Cave Cooperatives changes to Cotes de Roussillon, so too the landscape changes from one dotted with evergreen oaks to roadsides edged by Mediterranean pine. The land is flatter and the sky bigger, you sense the proximity of the sea long before you catch a glimpse of it. From Lapradelle to the outskirts of Perpignan is less than an hour's drive, but it is an interesting and varied one with much to savour and you might find yourself replaying in you head in the odd spare moment in more northern climes.
Then you hit the traffic. Built-up areas and motorhomes simply don't mix too well, and the next two hours' attempts to find somewhere to stay, were by turns, stressful, hair-raising, then wholly frustrating. We were headed for an aire situated at a motorhome dealers south of Perpignan. The directions to it seemed clear and simple enough. After we passed the sign to Macdonalds, Latour-bas-Elne for the third time, which featured large in the instructions, we did what we should have done in the first place, and put the GPS coordinates into the satnav. Even with Muriel's haughty assistance it was not easy to find, and featured a narrow lane with deep ditches on each side for the last half kilometre or so. A funny place to site a motorhome dealership; maybe the place started off selling VW microbuses, and just grew! Anyway we were faced with a closed iron gate on arrival, and a notice intimating that vans could only arrive after 5.00 and had to vacate the pitch before 10.00 the next day, and that, with electricity would be €12 - almost the same as a nearby ACSI campsite. We put the directions to Villeneuve-de-la-Räho Municipal into the Satnav and we were there in less than ten minutes, which was just as well, as we has not yet had lunch, and by now it was well after 2 o'clock.
In the end it proved fortuitous; Villeneuve-de-la-Räho proved rather delightful. As the name suggests it is a new town, but cast visions of Skelmersdale or Harlow from your mind. What the planners have done here is attempted to recreate a French hilltop village. It is situated above a large, oval shaped man-made lake, with spectacular views towards the Pic du Canigou and the Mont Alberes. Earlier we had driven through some grim, soul-less coastal sprawl near St Cyprien and Argeles sur Mer in our multiple circumnavigations of Perpignan, and it is sometimes tempting to simply equate new build with grim. Villeneuve-de-la-Räho shows that planned developments don't always have to grim, you can create placed on a human scale that don' t immediately strike the viewer as a blot on the landscape. It's not perfect, up close, wandering around the maze of streets it does at times have a certain 'toy-town' uniformity, and the newly created village square, with its church, cafe and boulangerie was oddly empty, on Sunday lunchtime. In time though it will develop community one senses, once its thirty something residents stop jogging around the lake anxiously glancing at their watches, and find time to frequent the cafe.
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| Villeneuve-de-la-Räho, from across the lake |
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| the old new church |
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| the 'toy-town' streets |
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| the town hall, which would not look out of place in Newport Pagnell. |
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| the empty cafe |
"We must be in the fittest place in France," Gill observed.
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