Meandering back through France

We drove through the beautiful spanish countryside and over the Pyrenees (with a few old piles of snow)  to the lovely French town of Saint-Jean-Pied-du-Port. It is famous for being one of the tradional starting points of the Way of St. James (the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela). The town is walled and has lovely narrow streets, a number of impressive gates and a citedal on the top of the hill. We set up camp in the aire near the river and had lovely weather that enabled us to have our tea and our morning breakfast outside.

The next day we headed towards Bergerac and found a French Passion vineyard just to the south; Domaine du Haut Montlong. The parking gave us amazing views across the Monbazillac vineyards. We had a short walk and the place was deserted - being Saturday afternoon!

On Sunday we tracked down the house owned by Joy Browne (Michael's fathers cousin) which we can remember visiting over twenty years ago. Joy died about 10 years ago and the house was all shut up but it was worth finding it.

We then had a long drive to our next stop Saint Leonard-de-Noblet. We were not impressed with the aire so drove on to Saint Priest-Tauron. A much smaller aire, right by a very fast flowing river. Amazingly we spotted a couple of otters on the opposite bank. After lunch we left Mitzi to her snoring and took Luna for a decent walk through some woodland and through a scary diary farm!

The next day we had an early start and decided to drive all the way to Fontainebleau. We had our late lunch stop at Fontainbleau forest so after lunch we could have an explore. The historic 'royal' forest was renowned for hunting and wood production and has lots of enormous bolders which are fun to climb.

After our walk we made our way to Fontainbleau and parked very near the amazing Chateau.