France 2010 - Ste-Enimie via A9 to Collioure

After my best nights sleep in two days (the previous being: the lumpy beds of Folkestone and the lorries of Chatillon-sur-Seine), I woke up feeling refreshed...

I open the hotel room window and look out.  Yes we were down a narrow street, but on looking upwards into the morning light the view was amazing.  We had found ourselves in a small village tucked down in the bottom of a very deep narrow gorge.

Ste-Etemie

The village was so pretty with all the houses tucked into and onto different ledges within the bottom of the gorge.  We go up and went around to the front of the hotel where we had our breakfast.  The breakfast room had panoramic views out of windows which ran all along the front of the hotel out onto the gorge with the river running through the centre.  Breakfast was lovely with fresh baguettes and croissants with butter and strawberry conserve along with fresh coffee and orange juice to drink.  Dyl was offered hot chocolate and was given a huge mug of hot fresh milk and a large tin of hot chocolate powder so he could scoop as much as he liked in to his milk.  He had seconds of hot chocolate too.

After breakfast and paying for our room (unfortunately my well known credit card wouldn’t work so I had to pay in cash) we went off to have a look around the village.  Kayaking seemed to be the popular past time in the gorge with numerous vendors offering Kayaks for rent.  You could start at one end of the river and get picked up at the other and then taken back to your destination by bus.  It looked great fun and I would have loved to have had a go but unfortunately my suitcase consisted of a more St Tropez theme instead of outward bounds. So I had to give it a miss.

We left Ste-Enimie to continue spending the rest of our morning driving through various gorges around the area.  The depth and scenery around the gorges was breath taking.  I would recommend a visit to this area of France.  It is the one place I would love to revisit but with my all-terrain gear.

A view of the valley on route through Central Massiff

Here is a view of the sat nav as we were driving through the gorges

It was now Saturday lunchtime and we felt we had better start making our way to our first weeks holiday destination so we emerged from the Central Massiff and headed down and out onto the A9.  As we were now getting hungry we and need a stop we pulled off at the first Services we came to. 

Excluding Mende, the roads had been fairly clear of traffic up until now, but we had now met up with the rest of France heading down to the south for their holidays.  The car park was overflowing and thousands of people everywhere.  We made as quick a comfort stop as possible (still took about an hour) and moved on.

Unfortunately we only moved on about a kilometre or two when we hit the mother of all traffic jams and what we thought would only take an hour or two eventually took about 5 hours.

After much liaising and panicking with the owner of our villa (Mdme Butterfly), we eventually pulled into the lay by, off the main road to Collioure (as described).  The lay by was populated with a large number of fire trucks and fire men along with what looked like a family camping out the back of their beat up old van.  We were met at the gate by Mdme Butterfly who welcomed us to her villa and opened the gate to let us in.  She asked if we could give her a lift back to the villa.  We did not realise at this time how big the villa property actually was.  After closing the gate we drove up a really long steep and winding driveway to the top of a hill where the villa stood.  Mdme Butterfly then showed us around the property explaining where she lived, her daughter and what areas were private and which were ours to use.

I have to say the property and gardens were exceptionally beautiful.  She left us with a huge bunch of keys.  There were two for the front door two for the inner front door one for the back door/gate and one for the main driveway gate.  She made the point of always making sure we locked all the doors and gates for security.  This made us a little nervous as we at this time did not know the area and the villa was in a fairly remote in location.

As the time was getting on we dumped our luggage and headed out in the car to the town of Collioure. 

We drove straight down to the sea front and quickly found a parking spot.  Not too sure if we were supposed to park where we did but we couldn’t understand what the flashing light on the space meant.  After parking the car we headed off to find some food.  I should mention at this point our family are not fish eaters and I am the only one who sometimes ventures into a few shellfish.  As we were now wandering around a town situated on the Mediterranean sea, as you can imagine, most of the restaurants, thought hey looked lovely, were serving only fish.  In the end we settled for one on the sea front, which though not Italian did seem to cater for children more than adults.  The children and Pug had either sausage or chicken and frites and I thinking I was being adventurous ordered moules and frites.  I normally love mussels but these were not very good.  They were small and had not been cleaned and seemed to have been cooked in sea water.  frites were nice though and the mussels were fresh at least.  I did notice, looking around me, that the majority of the restaurant customers were eating the same dish of moules and frites.

We headed back to the villa for a nervous nights sleep…