Montelimar

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Wednesday night

This Premiere Classe has been refurbished recently, but the rooms are bigger and the bathroom has a shower with a bath to collect the water. Through preference I love to soak in the bath, so with a little ingenuity, because there was no plug, I managed to have a bath, my first for two weeks.

We went next door to the Campanille for dinner, pasta chicken and chicken with a mushroom source, and two buffet desserts. Good food, very tasty.

Still raining.

Thursday, 9th October, 2008.

Grey, but dry out.

Plan for today, from Macon to Born En Bresse/ Viriat which is about 40 kms as the crow flies, via a tour of the countryside. There are a couple of things locally that we are hoping to find, but our next accommodation is very close, so no pressure.

We visited the local supermarket to get a picnic lunch, the set off at a leisurely pace, tootling around the local countryside.

The local geography is mainly boulder clay and the fields fill with water. The farmers take advantage of this, to farm fish and frog legs. We were driving around to see this for ourselves and take in some rural French countryside.

Entering a place called Thoissey, there was a beautiful avenue of plane trees. I stopped the car and took a picture.

We didn't see any frogs, although we did see plenty of water. The area is known as Les Dombes.

After driving around for a while we found one of the local places of interest we had thought to visit, the Parc des Oiseaux - a bird park. We ate our picnic lunch in the car park, baguette, ham, cheese, olives and banana's for dessert. The olives were great.

The bird park has lots of waterfowl and ducks due to the lakes of course. Flamingo's, Parrots Rhea's and all that sort of stuff. We ambled round the place until the bird show at 1530.

There was a party of elderly French people, doing the park at the same time as us, and whilst in our sight two of the gentlemen had fallen over, both seemed ok.

There is an amphitheatre used for the “spectacular”. The commentary was obviously in French, so don't really know what they were on about. However, the parrots and various of the birds flew from keeper to keeper across the crowd , which was very clever.

After the show we visited the shop and left the park.

The satnav got us to the hotel after about 25 kms drive arriving about 5. This was our first stop at a Balladins and although about the same price as Premire Classe, I wouldn't rate it quite as highly. The Free WiFi wouldn't connect either. Lots of other similar hotels in the area.

Had dinner in the Campanille next door. Two buffet hors d'oeuvres and two buffet desserts. Pat had an apertif which was cheaper than my diet coke! Fill your boots food.

Whenever we arrive at our hotel for the evening which is usually around five o'clock, a police siren seems to go off in the distance, the same happened tonight, really strange.

The weather wasn't really up to much for most of the day.

Friday 10 October, 2008

The plan for today is a drive from Bourg En Bresse / Viriat, to Montelimar, the home of nougat. Another fairly long journey most of it running alongside the Rhone.

We set off about about 1000 ish, and had a short motorway stretch then on dual carraigeways. We didn't do very well around a place called Vienne and did a loop around and eventually got back on track, saw a lot of French countryside.

After that, we knew we had a straight run through heading due south, so stopped off at a supermarket and got our usual type of lunch, ham and cheese, baguette and some fruit.

It has to be noted that the temperature did go up little by little as the journey passed. Some olive trees were also noted.

Pat managed to find us a lovely spot near Crozes De Hermitage, right next to the Rhone and we actually managed to get out the picnic chairs for the first time.

Made our way on to the Premiere Classe we were hoping to stay at, Les Tourettes. We had no internet last night so we used the self Service Reception to book ourselves a room, when we arrived. It was about three o'clock by this time and we decided that it was about time to find a launderette, as we were both running out of things.

We went into Montelimar itself, which was about 7/8 miles down the road. Found the town centre and parked. Then courtesy of the Tourist information office managed to locate a Lavarie, within walking distance of where the car was parked. So the next few hours we spent washing and drying our smalls. There was a very nice French / Algerian guy, with a couple of young kids, who talked to us while we were waiting. Between us we could just about hold a conversation.

After that we decided to grab some dinner in Montelimar, it was about 7 o'clock by now and found a place called Au Bureau, the waitress spoke very good English, A Tuna Pizza and a Burger and chips, went down very well. Back to the Hotel after a long day for us. Which was also our first experience of driving at night.

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Photos

Thoissey, France
Avenue of Plane trees

Parc des Oiseaux
Highly coloured bird

Parc des Oiseaux
Dolittle?

Parc des Oiseaux
Bird spectacular, flying just above the crowd

Rhone
Picnic

Rhone
Our view for lunch