Finding the way in a strange country seems to me almost unbelievably easier now than just a few years ago; I’ll tell you why later. But first, we want to tell you about our last day in Flavigny, Friday 24 May.
By chance the day before, I’d found that the local Farm Restaurant “Auberge Ferme”, in the heart of the village, and a two minute walk from home, was to be open on that day for a big lunch and I’d managed with a little bit of persistence to have the boss lady accept Mary and me as paying guests (she had thought they were “complet” but did a recalculation and decided two more could just fit in). So this was all we’d scheduled for the day. Easily filling in the morning with masterly low level activity we turned up at 12:30 to find the barn-like structure set with about 100 places, with between four and 20 seating spots set on each of eight or ten tables, completely filling the available floor space. On most of the tables were already placed large bowls of sliced bread sticks. Clearly, some serious eating was planned.
The venue. Cooking and dining was conducted on the ground floor only. All guests entered and departed by the single door on the right. Nice to have some sunshine, eh?
In all of the space there were only two guests present when we walked in and they were at a table for four tucked away in a corner, already onto their first course. As you’d expect, these were our dining companions, a couple of Parisians about our age who were just driving around Burgundy for a few days and happened to stumble on this eating opportunity, eating being a favourite pastime of the French. Neither our table companions nor the staff knew more than the odd word of English; Mary and I have no French to speak of or with.
The barn was beautifully warm inside and reeked with the odours of freshly-cooked wholesome produce, all local as we discovered. After the customary initial confusion as to exactly how guests obtain their food we saw a pile of trays and twigged that it was self service, except that a fair bit of “conversation” had to occur for every dish selected, and, as we found, some selected dishes were actually delivered to the table as soon as they were ready, regardless of the situation with the previous course. As our native French table guests explained apologetically “Tres difficult”, but we loved it. A red wine occasion it surely was, and I breasted the counter to take charge of that particular need. “Superior au ordinaire?” Ahhh, vin ordinaire of course, and I returned to the table with an unlabelled bottle which almost certainly had been filled from a barrel, five minutes ago.
Barely had we started on the entree when the door opened and in charged a party of 20 or so, mainly young women, chatting excitedly in north American. Ushered to a couple of tables next to us they explained they were college students from Vermont, with their professor, and expressed amazement when we explained that we were from Australia. Within another five minutes the whole place was full, mainly of French, and the dining experience was in full cry with steaming bowls of beef borguignon and accompaniments being conveyed efficiently by the village ladies to the starving hordes.
Taken without flash, so some motion blurring, but they give some impression of the hubbub. Notice the portrait of the cow on the mantlepiece in the second pic! Classic!
For Mary and me no evening meal was needed. Enough said!
Our attention now turned to our next destination, the town of Figeac, in the Lot region, just over 500km south west. As the iPad and later the TomTom told me, this journey would require seven to eight hours driving. In the event, these predictions were amazingly accurate, given that we were going across the main traffic flow of France and encountering numerous villages and uncountable roundabouts in the process.
For this journey we were relying mainly on the car’s built-in TomTom for navigation. By 8:00 am Saturday we were packed and in our seats in Flavigny. Mary had commanded the TomTom, via the hand held wireless remote control, to show us the way. Given the option by TomTom, we chose to avoid toll roads.
The previous day I'd emailed the contact person for our Figeac accommodation telling him that I expected to be at the rendezvous in Figeac at 4:00pm, basing this on iPad’s assessment of the journey time and a guess at our probable departure time. Now, in the car, at 8:00am at Flavigny in drizzling rain, at the start of a 500km jouney, the TomTom predicted that we’d be in Figeac at 3:23 pm. This predicted time is continually updated on the display so I intended to monitor it as we went along.
The weather was dreadful, mostly, but the trip went smoothly. We took a short lunch and refuel break after 300km and later stopped for about ten minutes at an Intermarché supermarket for some essential supplies, delays which TomTom could presumably not predict. Our actual arrival time at Figeac was 3:50pm, only 27 minutes longer than the original predicted journey time and which was almost exactly the time we spent not driving. Remarkable, I think.
About 300km into the trip we started to see snow on the high ground to the SW, where we were headed. Now this is France in late May, and snow was unexpected even though the weather had been uncomfortably cold since our arrival. Our journey took us over one of the higher passes in the Massif Central and here we encountered falling snow, the first we’d seen for many years.
Note the snow piled on the roofs of the approaching cars. Pic by Mary, while we were driving.
We found a safe pull-off spot and I was briefly snow-flaked. Our car.
Cattle in a snow covered field. Pic by Mary.
Coming in to Figeac
Google Streetview had shown me that it would be unlikely that we’d get our car right to the door of our accommodation. This assessment was reinforced by our landlord’s assertion that we could park “nearby” so I examined the satellite view of Figeac and found a likely car parking place a short walk from the known location of our accommodation. Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted, as the Army adage goes, and this was reconnaissance from afar. Even so, an eerie feeling of deja vu cropped up as we drove toward this car parking spot, while watching our progress on a satellite view of the town on the iPad. Back at home I’d used Streetview to actually take a ground-level look at some of the trickier intersections which I could see in the satellite view. Now I was seeing those places again, but this time on the ground. This advance knowledge meant I could drive without guidance straight to the carpark where we found and grabbed the single space available. The time was 3:55pm. At 4:01pm I was at our landlord’s door.
Figeac (pronounced Fijeac) seems a great town. We have a week here before moving on.
Thanks for reading
Kev and Mary
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