What we did in the shadows

We've been in Spain now for ten days. Aside from the day we drove from Loupian to I'Escala when it was a tad overcast for a time, the heatwave we experienced in France continued unabated in Catalonia. Wall to wall blue, mid thirties by 11am, the real feel a couple of degrees more, day time temperature in the van.....

Even with all the windows and skylights open it still hovered around the low twenties in the van overnight. The only covering we needed was a cotton sheet, but still we only slept fitfully.

Initially we headed to the Illa Mateua site in the pinewoods behind Cala Montgro. It's a beautiful spot, next to one of the Costa Brava's most alluring coves.

 The place is on the outskirts of l'Escala, a pleasant low key resort at the southern end of the Bay of Roses. We know the area well and keep returning to it because there's lots of opportunities to mooch about doing this and that - a cliff top ramble with a view across the bay towards the Pyrenees, a cycle track into town with the promise of a coffee or a gelato at the end of it, swimming or paddleboarding in the clear waters of the nearby cove. All lovely things, but curtailed this time because it was simply too hot most of the time to do anything.

The day we arrived was a little cooler and cloudy, so we did climb the hill at the back of the site and admire the distant view of the mountains.

Most days we took a stroll through the trees that edge the cove, but weren't tempted to spend time at the beach.

It was busier than we are ued to, probably because when we've been here previously it either later in the autumn or in the Spring. September is no longer 'low season', retirees and couples without kids head en-masse for the Med while the weather is still comfortable for a beach holiday but the resorts are more adult rather than family orientated.

The result is that  the 'shoulder season' can be almost as frantic as the high season The Illa Mateua campsite has now acquired the suffix 'resort'. Its p changed character since we first used it nine years  ago. As now the site was split between a flat area dedicated to tourers on the right of the main road and a series of terraces to the left in pine woods straggling up a steep hill.

We prefer this area, partly because its shadier and feels more relaxed.  Also it used to house a lots of Spanish statics. Weekends were slightly raucous, an impromptu fiesta as extended Spanish families cooked a big lunch that morphed seamlessly into a party that lasted until midnight.

Today there seems to be only a handful of seasonal pitches remaining. Now the majority of people using the upper pitches are tourists from elsewhere - recently retired French and German couples predominanate. It's all a bit bourgeois and not to our taste. It remains a beautiful spot, but the beach is much busier than it used to be and the campsite feels more corporate. I wonder if we will return again.

As ever I have a plan sketched out for our trip. We rarely stick to it and often it's the weather that puts the kibosh on things. Usually we are trying to dodge the rain, I never anticipated having to adjust our plan because it was too sunny.

 We left Cala Montgro still intending to stay at a parking place by the Lidl at Palafuguel. The spot was well reviewed on 'Searchforsites' and the nearby cycleway to Pals looked interesting.

When we arrived at the place the  area was just a piece of waste ground near a roundabout. A couple of other half abandoned looking mohos were parked-up and the environs felt a tad sketchy. Furthermore, it had no shade whatsoever, the afternoon temperature was forecast to reach the mid-thirties, dropping back to around 24° overnight.We abandoned our planned cycle trip.

Instead we decided to drive south during the heat of the day heading to a shady campsite we knew at L'Ametlla de Mar. The town is a few miles north of the Ebro delta at the opposite end of Catalonia, a 180 mile drive down the AP7 skirting the sprawl of Barcelona and Tarragona. 

At times there were hold-ups, but we managed to arrive at Camping Nautic just after 5pm.

Whatever happens our stay is likely to be less  eventful than our previous one in early October 2017. It coincided with a constitutional crisis prompted by Catalonia's regional government plan to hold an independence referendum. As the Spanish King began an evening address on TV calling for national unity the population of I'Ametila took to their balconies and began banging on pots and pans to drown out the broadcast. All seems very peaceful now, but I suspect the issue has simply been shelved rather than resolved, similar to the situation in the Basque Country, Corsica, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Camping Nautic has been upgraded significantly since then, but it still remains a relaxed kind of place with it's own pine clad cove -  Cala de Pixavaques, but it's also on the edge of town. So it's easy to walk to the shops.

A perfect place to be holed-up in a heatwave. We stayed for a week and did very little. By 11am the temperature reached the mid thirties and stayed that way until sunset.

Days drifted by, rushing about was not an option...

Our pitch was close to the beach. Sunrise happened around 8am. We could watch it rise without stirring out of bed...

After breakfast before the temperature became intolerable I paddled about for a bit, some days I had the cove to myself.

The moho awning is insufficient to provide shade in the middle of the day. We carry two big cotton throws and peg them onto the awning's fascia to create a shady space when there's a heatwave. It's the first time we have had to use both of them.

More days drift by. We spend hours doing very little, I wonder if brain activity slows as the outside temperature creeps up towards body temperature.

Around fiveish a cooling breeze blows in from the sea, I've taken to having an early evening swim. Our pitch is about fifty metres from the beach, which is accessed through a gate with a code. It exercises  both body and brain because forgetting the four digit number results in a half kilometre detour  to the site's main entrance.

Cala de Pixavaques is about 200m long. By day three I plucked up the courage to swim it's length, Most of the cove is quite shallow - around 1.5m, so I could just about reach the bottom, but a section in the middle was deeper. It isn't really a challenging swim, but since I took up paddleboarding I haven't been swimming much, apart from the occasional moment when I've taken a brief unplanned dip! So swimming across the cove proved I hadn't lost my confidence entirely and had built-up my stamina a bit. Gill took a photograph of me halfway across...

We also walked into town a couple of times. L'Ametila is an unpretentious small port that developed from a fishing village into a medium sized town during the latter half of the last century.

The older part consists of a tangle of steep, narrow streets behind the harbour.

The more recent developments form a grid of rectilinear lo-rise blocks built around a series of public squares. The town is utilitarian rather than beautiful, but it feels lived in and lively, it has character.

A surefire sign of this is the small municipal market that's open six days a week, it sells fabulous fresh ingredients and useful stuff like underwear and work clothes. No tourist tat to be seen! 

We like the town, sadly it was too hot to simply mooch around. We spent most days squirreled under the awning seeking shadow.

Over the past week at twilight we've watched the moon wax from bean-shaped to a squished balloon. Last night it became full - a plump harvest moon glinting silver on the calm sea.

Where next has been the main topic of conversation over the past couple of days. Rain is forecast, we have decided to head to Valencia Camper Park for the three days. A city visit makes more sense in showery weather than a beach. Also, Valencia is a crossroads, we can head north towards Teruel and Rioja, or southwest towards Cartegena or Almeria. When the weather pattern for early October becomes clearer, we'll decide.

Under the circumstances I can't think of anywhere better to have hunkered down for a week than here at Camping Nautic - the pitches are shaded, the facilities good,  the site well managed and friendly and its is situated by a lovely beach next to an amiable seaside town. All is good.

Simmer gently, then bring to the boil.

There is a simple reason why we haven't taken to the by-roads of bonny Scotland or driven to see the midnight sun at Nordcapp. One of the delights of motorhoming for months on end is being able to live outside. It only takes three rainy days in a row and cabin fever sets in, and our 7 x 2.3 metre metal box becomes more like a big hutch than a small house. Consequently our travels over the past dozen or so years mainly have been through Europe's sunnier climes, apart from a springtime trip to Scandinavia in 2019, and a moment of weakness a couple of years later when erroneously we decided that Ireland might be an interesting place to visit. 

The challenges this year have been significantly different. Earlier in the year our habitual late winter trip to Iberia was not unusual, zigzagging our way around the peninsula trying to find the sunniest spots, keeping a 'weather eye' on Met Eireann's Atlantic pressure charts, which are the best weather graphics we have found; they provide an animated summary of the meteorological big picture for Europe's western seaboard from Tromso to Gibraltar.

Since then we have had a different challenge weatherwise. Weeks of wall to wall blue would be ideal great had the endless sunny days not been accompanied by daytime temperatures well into the thirties followed by tropical nights. Even with all the windows and skylights fully open, the van doesn't cool down, we spend hours squirreled under the awning rather than getting out and about.

In May we went long haul simmering in the humidity of Hong Kong and Tokyo; in late June and early July we boiled in the Czech Republic, then arrived home to an unprecedented heatwave. September and October are usually a pleasant time to travel in southern Europe, daytime temperatures in the high twenties are not uncommon, but nights dip down into the mid-teens, so you get comfortable sleep. 

Not so this year, the whole time we were in the camping municipal at Loupian by the Etang Thau daytime temperatures were well into the thirties by late morning and struggled to drop into the teens overnight.

It's a lovely corner of France and under blue skies it looks captivating. However simply mooching about wasn't an option, in extreme heat the minutiae of everyday existence needs to be carefully pre-planned. 

The nearby town of Meze has a traditional market twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays. It's a popular thIng for locals and tourists alike, and because it closes on the dot at noon we managed a visit on both days before the heat became unbearable.

A cycleway connects Meze to the villages to by the Etang to the east. Formerly it was a narrow gauge railway built to take the Etang de Thau's famous oysters to market. 

The railway is long gone but the oyster trade is flourishing. We cycled to nearby Bouzigues. The village is a major producer of oysters and mussels. It looked to us that the beds had grown significantly since we were last here two years ago. 

The place itself is a classic southern French village with a tangle of narrow streets leading up from the waterfront to the church and small square at its centre. It's a place with a singular mission- oysters! This gives it a purposeful atmosphere, it's not simply a tourist trap like so many places on France's Mediterranean littoral. 

The boulangerie in the centre of the village is an excellent example of a local family run business that produces traditional bread, croissants and cakes. These used to be ubiquitous, but less so these days, so it's always a moment to savour when serendipitously you happen upon one.

The heat mades it more comfortable to cycle than to walk. Getting to and from Bouzigues along the cycle track was almost pleasant. The narrow streets on the village had plenty of shade too, but the heat was brutal.

As soon as we sat down on a seat with a view of the Etang de Thau to consume the pain chocolats we had just bought we began to bake. We scooted back to the campsite to finish our lunch beneath the awning.

A waterbus runs across the Etang from Meze to Sete, operating from mid-May to mid-September. We've used it before and enjoyed stopping for lunch in a small café near Sete market. The place specialises in different types of coffee and makes a bit of a thing about reinventing the humble 'croque'. For some reason the place opted to name their elevated toasties after sex bombs of Hollywood's golden age. Previously I'd gone for the 'Rita Haywood', and being a creature of habit probably would do so again.

We figured that the 20 minute boat trip across the Etang would be cooling on a hot day. Sadly we forgot the waterbus had a glass roof. The temperature, tropical at the outset, became equatorial before were were halfway across.

 It's about a twenty minute walk from the pier where the waterbus docks to our lunch spot in Rue Alsace Lorraine, a small street near Les Halles de Sete. We stuck to the shady side of the streets, the shadows were jagged edged and the temperature intolerable in the sun. 

Sete is unexpectedly grand for a medium sized port, with tree-lined boulevards of elegant Art Nouveau buildings which wouldn't look out of place in Paris's 16th Arrondissement. 

The area we headed for was not so grand, but attractive nonetheless, a grid of more modest streets below the woods of Mont Sant-Claire, the cone shaped hill in the centre of Sete - one of a series of ancient volcanic outcrops which punctuate the expansive salt flats that stretch the length of Languedoc's coastline.

We arrived in the right area but couldn't find the exact spot. It took us a while to work out that the name of the café was different on Google maps to the sign over the door - anyone looking for the place listed on Google as 'Tatie Cherry' will struggle, the sign above the door remains the same as the previous two times we have been here - Torrefaction Noailles

By now it was a little after 1.30pm, the tables outside were all taken, but one place was available inside. By the time our food arrived the place was more or less empty. The idea of eating lunch at 1.45pm would seem very weird to a French person, but we're not French so we don't care.

I do love this informal little cafe, it feels a bit 'rive gauche' and bohemian, a bit chaotic, but the food is exceptional for such a workaday place.

,

 As predicted I found myself slowly devouring Rita Hayworth who turned out to be just as delicious as my previous attempt. 

You have a choice of legendary Hollywood vamps on a plate, Le Rita Hayworth features chorizo & poivrons, Le Veronika Lake contains jambon cru, mozzarella & parmesan. The inference is that Rita was hotter than Veronica; that seems debatable to me. 

What it does reveal is that the Metoo movement never quite achieved the same traction in France as in other Western countries. Aside from gender politics, I don't think it's feels right to name dishes after people, unless the name memorialises the chef who created the dish in the first place. Otherwise it seems a little cannibalistic.

Last time we were in Sete we managed to catch the 3pm waterbus back to Meze. Maybe we've relaxed even more these days, it was apparent that by the time we'd settled-up at the cafe catching the mid-afternoon boat was going to be tricky. Making a dash for it wasn't an option, with temperatures in the mid thirties anything quicker than an amble risked heat stroke.

The later boat was at 5pm, meaning we had over two hours to spend somewhere else in Sete. We decided to walk towards the fishing port on the seaward side of the town. We tried to stay in the shadows but that wasn't always possible. 

Then we found a shadier way back to the waterbus pier using the narrow backstreets behind the port

The area was more characterful and multicultural than the Parisian looking boulevards around Avenue Victor Hugo. Sete has ferry links to Morocco and Algeria. When we first visited the town in the early noughties the Arabic connection was quite evident. It seems more mixed now, with as many people of West African heritage as Algerian.

With half an hour or so to spare before we needed to be back at the quayside, we found a shady cafe and ordered a couple of beers. We talked through what next. According to France Meteo and Aemet, the Spanish weather service, the heatwave seems to have set in for the next couple of weeks.

The coolest place we have is when we are driving with the cab aircon on full blast. Let's head for Spain we decided, it may well be just as hot on the Costa Brava but at least it will be a comfortable drive there.

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 )

le Sud

Yesterday we headed south down the A75 from Massiac towards Millau. It's one of my favourite drives, partly because the southern Causse are spectacular - a dessicated looking limestone plateaux punctured by ancient volcanic cones and deep wooded gorges - but also more importantly, it's where 'le Sud' begins. Officially 'le Midi' is defined as the area of France south of 45° latitude. Whereas the points where the motorway rises above 1000m is marked with signs at the col, the moment when you arrival in the south is not acknowledged. It just happens a couple of kilometres south of the junction  at St Flour.

If you wish to take a moment to savour your escape from northern climes the nearby motorway aire with a view of Gustav Eiffel's famous iron railway viaduct is the nearest convenient stopping place. Positioned at 44.97° it's near enough. 

However, the question is - does 'le Midi' actually exist? I don't think it's just a romantic notion. There are some palpable differences. For example you can get ornamental olive trees in gardens north of the 45th parallel, but commercially viable olive groves are only found south of the line. In truth 'le Midi is an amalgam of mathematical truth, geographical fact and cultural affiliation. However it's obvious when you have arrived - you are struck by a pang of recognition like bumping into an old friend that you haven't seen for ages.

Purely in terms of appearance there is little difference between Massiac in the Cantal department and Millau in Occitania, similar looking narrow winding streets of austere stone or cement faced houses, often shuttered even during the day. However their ambience is different. Massiac has the atmosphere of a dour hill town, we recognise its vibe having lived 1000' up in the Pennines for almost forty years. Millau feels more vivacious, it exudes a southern  pizazz that is difficult to define exactly, but you can sense it.

We walked from the campsite towards the town centre beneath the majestic plane trees that shade Avenue Gambetta. I felt delighted to have arrived. The road is lined with nineteenth townhouses, a stylish neighbourhood back in the day and still home to Maison Fabre, an haute couture  glove maker. The company is one of the few remaining manufacturers in  Millau specialising high class leather goods, a craft associated with town for over 1000 years. https://maisonfabre.com/fr/.

However Millau is not especially exclusive or up-market like many of the old towns in Provence or the Cote d'Azur. Indeed some of the  backstreets are somewhat grungy. It seems to be left leaning too, the offices of the French communist party and the ANP (New Anti-capitalist Party)  were plastered with an outpouring of revolutionary zeal  like a bullshit bingo card for armchair Trotskyists.

The town is also a centre for outdoor adventure sports - whitewater rafting on the Tarn at Parc Aqua Vagues, hiking and mountain biking trails on the Le Plateau du Larzac, and paragliding from the top of the Pouncho d'Agast which overlooks the town. 

The latter activity is unmissable, its aficionados circle the peak from dawn 'til dusk like day-glo vultures.

We're adrenalin avoidant, our main aim was to find somewhere for lunch. Millau has many appealling looking cafés and restaurants but we decided to stick with an old favourite, 'Les Colonnes'. 

 Situated in the corner of Place Maréchal Foch, the café is so named because a colonnaded arcade runs along the west side of the big square. 

In terms of conforming to English stereotypes of what is typically French, offhand I can't think of anywhere that quite so readily ticks so many boxes - the square is named after a military hero of 'La Republique; two enormous plane trees, planted in 1906 gives shade from the fierce noonday sun, an elegant fountain provides the focal point, a pleasing mix of buildings from different eras surrounds it, down a narrow street you get a glimpse of the rocky hills of the Cevennes to the west. It's all very pleasing.

This is before you get to the street theatre. We  arrived  at Les Colonnes just before noon As Église Notre-Dame de L'Espinasse  tolled twelve the cafés in the square began to fill. Church bells competed with a series of random clanks emanating from the nearby streets. I couldn't place the noise, it was only later when we wandered past rows of shops with closed security shutters  I realised that it was the sound of dozens of  local businesses shutting-up shop on the dot. The French mass noon shut-down always catches me out - when driving down the autoroute and the traffic mysteriously evaporates - you know its 12.05pm!

Across the square les heures du déjeuner unfolded to order too. At eight minutes past twelve the solid double doors of École élémentaire Paul Bert opened and a few dozen primary school kids emerged and were matched off crocodile fashion with minders at the front and rear. A gaggle of local retirees arrived at the restaurant and the waiting-on staff quickly rearranged the furniture next to us to accommodate them.

By now there were a couple of dozen people waiting to be served. The young staff were brilliant, orders were quickly taken and dishes appeared magically from the small kitchen beyond the bar. In her twenties Gill worked in kitchens and waited-on, she's an 'order of service' aficionado. She was impressed!To make sure everyone is attended to promptly in a busy restaurant takes hard work and attention to detail - the staff at Les Colonnes were impressive, and charming too, no stereotypical surly French waiters here!

Despite France's growing addiction to American style fast food chains over recent decades it is still possible to find traditional neighbourhood bistros here and there. If you exclude microstates like Monaco and Andorra, France has the highest numbers of Macdonald's fast food outlets in Europe. Given the chain is just one of many the corporate restaurant chains to be found in centres commerciale and the outskirts of towns across France then the idea that the country is still some kind of world leader for gastronomy is risible. To put it bluntly there seems to be far more fat French people than there were when we first visited here in the mid 1970s. Statistics bear this out. Chatgpt's take on the question - "Yes. A reasonable summary is: France has gone from roughly 1 adult in 15 being obese in the 1980s to around 1 in 6 today.

That's an increase of roughly 150–180% in prevalence, depending on which starting year and survey series are used."

In our experience the simple pleasures on offer at Les Colonnes, though not exactly rare, has become untypical in France. When eating out here we have been disappointed as often as delighted in recent years. This is our third visit to Les Colonnes, it bucks the trend, we've had a delightful time every time.

A two course menu du jour is available for €17. Tempting, but we chose saucisse aligot because it was reviewed favourably and we had never tried the famous dish. It's almost local, originating in the Middle Ages as a hearty offering for pilgrims heading through the Aveyron towards Santiago.

The reviewers on Google were right, the saucisse aligot was delicious. We mused for a while about whether this was the best sausage a mash we had ever eaten. We were in two minds about this, the ones we had in Greenwich a year ago were very delicious too. Now that Matthew and Kristyna have moved to Dulwich we're probably not going back to Greenwich. However, I am certain this will not be the last time we celebrate our arrival in the south with lunch at Les Colonnes.

The world is full of uncertainty and becomes ever more alarming This week's thing to worry about - an AI Armageddon. However, simple pleasures exist even in the darkest of times and a skillful human chef is always going to rustle up a more delicious saucisse aligot than a robotic one.

Drive through departments

America boasts 'fly over states', the big bit in the middle that few people visit unless they have to, like Iowa or Nebraska. The central 'great plains' are shaped  by the Mississippi's enormous watershed. France has a more modest equivalent formed by the watershed of the Loire.

We've just driven from Dreux to Bruère-Allichamps. Dreux is situated in the north of the 'Eure et Loir' - a truly watershed department, the river Eure is a tributary of the Seine, the Loir, as the name indicates, flows into its near namesake. As for the town itself the place illustrates nicely my theory about France's overlooked middle. We've used the place's unlovely Camping-car Park in the industrial outskirts a few times. It's a convenient stopping place when heading south towards the Loire and beyond. The spectacularly brutalist industrial structure overlooking the aire  frequently features in reviews, the comments tend to be disparaging.

I quite like it, brutalism was the predominating architectural style of my youth, as a mid-century adolescent, raw concrete, prog rock and existentialism shaped my outlook!

We've never made it into Dreux's 'centre ville'. On Streetview it looks nice enough, a few ancient monuments and pedestrianised shopping streets....

However that's not why the town makes the national news every so often. From time to time France's 'culture wars' hit the headlines. Generally the skirmishes tend to be risible rather than menacing. For example, this summer the mayor of Mandelieu-la-Napoule, near Cannes, relit a decade old controversy by attempting to ban the burkini on the town's beaches, uniquely making the resort somewhere you get into trouble for covering-up rather than over enthusiastically stripping off.

Intractable issues lurk beneath these absurdities. Every so often the troubled relationship between France's North African citizens and La Republique's secular values boils over. Cars get torched in the banlieues of Parisian satellite towns or the public housing blocks of Roubaix and Marseille. Pitched battles ensue between local youths and the riot police. Surprisingly Dreux often gets a mention too. About 35% of its population is of North African heritage, not something you might expect a neat country town in the middle of nowhere. Dreux is also blighted with high levels of income inequality and youth unemployment. The first time we stopped here was a few days after one of these periodic flare-ups. Wrecks of burned out cars littered the outskirts, the tarmac at the entrance to the town's centre commerciale was scorched where a barricade of burning tyres and had been erected. Today all was calm and the same centre commerciale was busy, maybe things are improving in Dreux, we speculated.

Our preferred route south towards Languedoc is to head down the free A75 motorway across the Massif Centrale south of Clermont Ferrand. We've experimented with all kinds of ways of getting from the Loire valley to Clermont Ferrand using a variety of toll free route national - directly south from Orleans using the D2020 towards Bourges and Moulins; alternatively following the Loire as it arcs southwards, using the D952 via Sancere and Nevers. Actually there is little to choose between them, they are both slow, with lots of roundabouts and villages that look depopulated and god forsaken, their only remarkable feature being over enthusiastic traffic calming and peculiarly over-designed lanp-posts.

We're definitely not in 'la belle France' hereabouts. I wondered if there was a phrase in French to describe the bleak departments in the 'middle bit'. My new travel buddy 'Chatgpt,' suggested two: 'terretoires fragile' or 'La France du vide' - empty France. The central area features strongly in the map highlighting areas of deprivation in France, along with the southwest, Brittany and the Grand Est.

Taking inspiration from my own 'moniker' '- drive through departments' - this time we decided to do exactly that. Instead of crawling down the truck choked 'route nationales'  we opted to use toll motorways - not cheap, about £50 for a journey of 200 miles. The upside is it's a lot less stressful. With the cruise control set at 90kph, trundling along equidistant from the truck in front and the one behind, the kilometres tick by. It's less exhausting. Perhaps I need to acknowledge that age is catching up with me, I definitely get more tired driving day after day than I did a decade ago. These days we are not on a shoe-string budget like we were when we first started travelling long term back in 2014, so why make things trickier than they need be for the sake of saving a bit on motorway tolls?

As you might expect travelling has changed over the last ten years, not always for the better. There are far more motorhomes than there used to be in southern Europe even outside of the crowded summer period. We were not the only ones planning an itinerant retirement! These days turning up on spec expecting to find a pitch near the Med in France in the autumn or during the winter in southern Spain is a thing of the past. You need to book ahead. Some things have improved though, for example the Campingcar Park chain of motorhome aires in France has an app that allows you to book ahead on-line. We used three on the journey south, at Dreux, Bruère-Allichamps and Massiac. The latter two, like an increasing number of the Campingcar Park sites, are situated in former Camping Municipals. 

They have a more bucolic ambience than the majority of Campingcar Parks, which inadvertently for English motorhomers hint  at the downside of most  'aires de camping-car' - they are convenient, but you are camping in a car park.

Having spent most of the post dismissing France's drive through departments as bleak and somewhat god forsaken, in fact not everywhere conforms to the stereotype. Bruère-Allichamps is a pleasant village, more prosperous looking than most, possibly because of its proximity to the city of Bourges.

The place's claim to fame is that it is located in the geographical centre of France, so I guess being the middle of somewhere means I can't really accuse it of being in the middle of nowhere! Moreover, it has an excellent traditional Boulangerie. Sadly the place had sold out of croissants and pain chocolate by the time we presented ourselves somewhat tardiy at 11.30am on a Sunday morning. The baguette was excellent however, unlike the pallid simulcra on offer in supermarkets. Maybe I'm being unfair about France's 'fragile' middle bit, but I love the south more; Mediterranean landscapes are my happy place, and that's where we will be tomorrow.