All those threatening clouds had dissipated overnight and we awoke once again to a cloudless blue sky. Could this ever get boring? No, absolutely not. Anyone who thinks that large amounts of good weather gets tedious needs their lumps felt.…

Riez does have a market, at least on a Wednesday it does. Our road sign deductions proved to be accurate. It was an excellent market, too. For once we bit the bullet and paid market prices instead of supermarket prices…

One of the main reasons we headed southeast in France this year was to get into an area that we have hitherto not visited. The southeast part of France shouldering up against Italy contains a national park called the Mercantour…

The Vercors Massif is a large, difficult-to-access plateau lying at about 1000m/3100ft above sea level just to the north of Die. It’s an attractive place looking almost alpine and caters both for walkers and skiers. We visited the Vercors once,…

[Well, you can’t seriously expect me to resist a name like that, can you?] We’d had some of the wet stuff overnight but the morning was dry though still cloudy; clearly not a day to go up to the high…

Carol had located a camp site that sounded much more like us on the approach to Die (which, I imagine, is pronounced “Dee” in French); it was a relatively new aire naturelle (4-5 years old) that would “have some shade…

Having oggled some of the strange constructions atop volcanic outcrops in Le Puy, today we were setting off to move 65 miles or so south to Aubenas. While I was packing, Carol set off à bicyclette to get breakfast and…

Le Puy, to give it its familiar shortened name, lies smack bang in the middle of the Massif Central. a huge formerly volcanic mass of uplands in the middle of France. All three roads leading to Le Puy cross passes…

We appear to have lucked out; having arrived on Friday afternoon at Le Puy-en-Velay, we discovered that Saturday is market day. We set off this morning on foot for our first investigation. Our walk was a little further than we…