Sunday in Chalon

When you have visitors to stay what do you do around here on a Sunday? Chalon-sur-Saône has a wonderful market scattered around the old town and it is really worth a visit. On the way to the market Cees’ son had to be shown where his father had stayed for 3 weeks a couple of years ago during the “great pace-maker escape” of 2009, see photo and arrow. By the way, if you ever have to spend time in the cardiac unit of Chalon hospital, make sure you get a west facing room, there are lovely views of the cathedral from that side.

On to the market. The market is centred around the cathedral, but it seems to change streets every time we visit it. This time the market meandered around some streets we have never visited before and culminated in a very attractive small square. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of “organic” vegetable stalls this time, but the usual goats’ cheese, dried sausages and roast chicken stalls were also present in abundance, giving the whole a very appetising aroma. After spending the best part of an hour and half wandering round listening to the street musicians and enjoying the atmosphere, we made our move to lunch at the Indian restaurant Bollywood. Either we are getting less fussy or this restaurant is getting better every time we visit and this time was no exception - now that’s what I call a good Sunday lunch.

Chalon is the birth place of Nicéphore Niépce said to be the inventor of photography and it houses a museum detailing his achievements and housing several exhibitions per year about cameras and/or photography. When we visited this afternoon, there was an exhibition on family albums from the late 1800s up to the 1990s, just random family albums that have somehow come into the hands of the museum. It felt a little voyeuristic looking at family holiday snaps and baby photos from people you do not know and will most probably never meet, but I found them fascinating. Sadly though, the layout was such that it didn’t seem to grab every visitor’s attention.

The second exhibition was of a Swiss photographer (Karlheinz Weinberger) who took pictures of teenage “rebels” in the early 1960s, the photos must have looked intimidating and they would have been shocking to the general Swiss public in their time, but they look rather quaint in the 21st century. Having said that they were well taken and gave an interesting view of these Swiss gangs.

The supposed highlight of the museum was what I can only describe as an excessively long film explaining what was meant by calling Nicéphore Niépce “the inventor of photography”. In fact as far as I could tell from the story, although he never made a penny out of his invention, he was the first person to manage to get an image (be it a copy of a picture, an imprint of a leaf or a “photo” of his back garden) to be reproduced by using light from the sun. He did not produce photos as we know them, he used a chemical layer on a sheet of metal to cause the metal to be etched with the image just using sunlight, this metal sheet was then inked and used in a conventional press creating a reproduction. It could have been a very interesting film, but the length and the repetitiveness of the content left us all yawning.

So all in all I would say that the museum had lots and lots of potential, it had cameras galore, photos galore and information galore, but it didn’t seem to hang together, all in all it was sadly a missed opportunity.

Then it was home to Chazelle for a long sit in the back garden, feet up enjoying a glass of beer. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a Sunday.

La Tuilerie Website

Farmers Cause Traffic Chaos in Saône-et-Loire

We read in Friday’s paper that 60 tractors had travelled through Saône-et-Loire, grinding the traffic to a halt on Tuesday and Thursday this week. They were escorted by police motorbikes, intent on minimising the inconvenience to other road users, but with such a huge convoy travelling approximately 350 km over normal roads at little more than 30km/hr, the tailbacks were very long indeed, up to km in some places. Fortunately they didn't travel through Cormatin !

Nothing new I thought, obviously the farmers are on the warpath again against something or other, costs too high, income too low, subsidies disappearing, you name it they protest about it. Having lived in Kent for a number of years I got quite sick and tired of the amount of times my route to work (the M20) was used as a parking lot for lorries unable to get on the ferries due to yet another blockade or go-slow on the French side. What intrigued me though, as this is nothing special, why did the local newspaper dedicate a half page article to it?

Actually, this time it was something very special indeed. The terrible drought that has hit France and in particular this area and into l’Ain (the département to the south of us) has left milk producers and other cattle farmers with no feed at all for their animals. Many cows are being sent to slaughter early and even some milking cows are being destroyed as their owners cannot find feed any more. The cereal growing area of Seine-et-Marne 350 km to the north, heard the call for help and have offered their straw. So 60 farmers travelled for a day with empty trailers, spent a day loading at various farms and spent another day returning to their farms with hopefully enough straw to tide them over.

On the return route, as news spread of the convoy, the roads were lined in places with people who had come out specially to be witness to the event. It is not every day something like this happens.

The Mystery of Taizé Candles

I mentioned in my blog about Easter in Taizé that my candle at Easter burned for longer than the expected 6.5 minutes, but as I do not wear a watch I had no idea how long it was, although my guess was over 10 minutes. I have been asking campers and giters alike ever since, to time their candles for me at the Saturday evening service. To be honest I do not think that they have taken their responsibilities seriously and have been coming back with stories such as “sorry I forgot to look at my watch” and “yes it did seem like a long time” etc etc, all very unscientific and very unsatisfactory. On talking to a set of campers on the subject this week, I discovered that they had taken an extra candle and it was in their tent (I won’t mention that it was Jeanine who did this). On realising the error in their ways at not timing their candles during the service, they gave me their spare candle and we timed it together and it was indeed longer than 6.5 minutes - in fact it burned for 11 minutes.

But that is not the whole story of course. I managed to find some old burnt Taizé candles, one from Before the change and one from After the change. The shorter of the two is from Before.

The length of the unburned candle was 20.5 cm. After burning, the remaining length of the Before candle was 9.5cm and of the After candle was 14cm. The weight of the unburned candle was 6g so the weight of wax burnt with the Before candles was 3.2 g and the After candles was 1.9 g. Using the burn times mentioned before (6.5 mins and 11 mins respectively) this gives burn rates of 0.49g/min and 0.17g/min. So the Before candles burned nearly 3 times faster than the After candles. All very interesting information but what does it all mean ?

From a candle making website I found these remarks:

Wax is the most important ingredient that makes a candle burn faster. Soft wax has a higher oil content and lower melt temperature; therefore, it burns faster. ….. But the wick thickness compared to the candle weight and thickness will also have a serious effect on burn time.

So from these comments one can deduce that the Before candles had much thicker wicks than the After candles and that the wax used now is a harder blend. Funnily enough, I remember having rather greasy hands after burning the Before candles, not so with the After candles, so the problem of the candle ends melting in people’s hands on hot summer evenings has also been eliminated in the change.

Ok that is burn time and greasy hands sorted out, but what about the fact that the candles go out automatically leaving an unburned end that cannot be re-lit? For the sake of safety the candles have been designed to self extinguish and this is very simple indeed to explain. Whilst there is something that goes through the candle right to the bottom to make it look as though the candle has a wick, the “wick” in the lower part of the candle is such that it will not burn - either a different non-flammable material or the wick is impregnated so that it can no longer absorb the liquid wax, I suspect the latter.

So there you have it - all you ever wanted to know about Taizé candles !

La Tuilerie Website for information on accommodation near Taizé

Festival Guitares en Cormatinois

The Guitares en Cormatinois concert season has ended, all the planning and preparing of flyers and posters, delivering and posting them in strategic places has been done, collecting and putting out chairs, shifting grand pianos and manning the ticket sales is all over and we have our Saturday evenings back ! But we have really enjoyed the last few months of work and in particular the last month of concerts. The series used to be dedicated to bringing guitar music to “the people” but has now moved on to include a wider range of artists playing different instruments. Never-the-less there are always guitars somewhere in the series. This year three out of the five concerts were with guitar.

The first concert was with Alexander Baty who played the trumpet amazingly and at just 27 he has a very promising career ahead of him, he has already landed a job with the Amsterdam Concert Gebouw Orkest one of the top three orchestras in the world. His accompanist Véronique Goudia did a sterling job on the piano, but the acoustics of Cormatin Church let her down and so what should have been echoing sounds coming from the piano were rather tinny. Even so, the concert was excellent and very enjoyable.

On the 2nd July, Emmanuel Rossfelder (who is a yearly crowd-puller) was playing the Concerto d’Aranjuez with a group of 18 flutists. The open air venue of the ruin of St Hippolyte Deanery was a superb backdrop to the concert, but I must agree with Cees’ son when he heard what we were going to see when he said “does anyone need to listen to 18 flute players playing the Concerto d’Arajuez?” A number of the group had difficulty keeping pace with the music and hitting the high notes and this did not bring out the best in Rossfelder who somehow seemed to lose interest during the proceedings – a pity as he is really a superb player.

Adèle Bracco (vocals) and Thierry Moncheny (guitar) were supposed to also have had the open-air venue for their Brazilian Jazz concert but sadly, due to rain, they had to be moved to Bonnay church which had disastrous acoustics. No matter what they did during the sound check they could not get a clear sound beyond the third pillar and as volunteers we seat ourselves at the last minute and way back in the church. Whilst the music I could actually hear wasn’t exactly to my taste, I thought it was a good idea to include a guitar with a different music style to the purely classical that the festival tends towards.

The “local” venue for us was when Gérard Poulet (violin) and Dimitris Saroglou (piano) played Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms sonatas in Chazelle church. Although it is a somewhat scruffy looking church from the inside, the acoustics were sublime and the music was of a world-class standard. Normally towards the end of a concert I am fidgeting because of the ubiquitously un-comfy seats, but this concert kept me enthralled and I forget to even think about my numb bottom ! We were rewarded by two well received encores.

The last concert of the season was last night in Malay church. A lovely little Romanesque church a few minutes outside Cormatin. We have seen a number of concerts there, but we have always been early and sat on the plastic chairs placed at the front of the church or in the first row. Sitting at the back, the pews were absolutely “unsittable” and whilst the sound was still excellent, I had to move and walk around for a bit as the I started to get a serious pain in my back. In the end I found myself a cosy little spot behind a pillar and as I am too short to ever see the performers in a concert unless I am right at the front, it didn’t actually bother me at all not being able to see anything. What was amazing was that even though I was more than 20 meters away from the guitar player with at least two pillar between us, I could actually hear him breathing, so impressive are the acoustics in this venue. In any case Trio Alto (guitar, violin and cello) delighted the audience to an evening of soft classical music that I can only describe as light, romantic chamber-like music. The guitar was strung and played in such a way that it sounded very much like a harpsichord which beautifully accompanied this style of music. Once I had found my comfy spot, I could have listened to them all night.

All in all a good series, 3 out of 5 concerts were out of this world and even though I could have lived without the other two, the St-Hippolyte venue was worth it for the ambiance. Now all we have to do is start the planning and organising for next year !

Our accommodation near Cluny and Taizé: La Tuilerie Website

Night Markets

Every year in Saint-Gengoux-le-National there are two night markets one is on a Friday in mid-July and the other on a Friday in mid-August. The whole of the mediaeval town is full of stalls run by local artists and artisans selling their wares. Other stalls have local produce or food you can eat as you wander round. You can also join in the communal meal that is organised, shoving up on to the benches to be squashed in with the rest of the population. The markets start at eight in the evening and go on officially until midnight, but in reality they go on until everyone leaves. They are well visited and the quality of the stalls is high, so I was excited to see that this year Cluny has taken up the idea and is running three night markets on Wednesdays mid-June, mid-July and mid-August.


The second Cluny market was yesterday, so we decided to go. They start at five o’clock, but we felt that seven o’clock would be early enough to attend. I don’t know whether it was the cool weather or whether this new type of market will take time to catch on with traders, but there were really not many stalls and the quality of the artisanal work (jewellery, pottery etc) was not of an exceptional quality. Amongst the stalls doing a good trade were some nuns from Rhône-Alpes where they were selling jams and hand cream although I missed the connection between the two. There was a lack of food stalls, in fact all that was on offer were small, thick “bio” pizzas which were certainly

lacking in the topping department so we declined the offer of buying one and sadly being away from the main town, the local restaurants and snack bars couldn’t join in the fun. The beer stall though had two or three interesting beers, so we sat down with a beer and listened to the entertainment, which at that moment consisted of two women doing a rather poor Brecht-style performance accompanied by a barrel organ.

The backdrop of the Flamboyant Gothic town hall on the one side and the view over the Abbey on the other gave a certain ambiance to the event, but the fact that it was not in the hub of the town took away a lot of atmosphere and for me the whole lacked the cosiness and interest of the narrow cobbled streets that you find in Saint-Gengoux which could have been easily created by a more central position in the town.

We’ll keep our eye on this one though, as it does have potential to be an interesting and bustling market with the right setting and the right organisation.

World Record Attempt

We have had a valiant attempt at the “most number of consecutive nights” camping award class 1. Thomas from Germany who originally booked for 14 nights extended his stay by a week and at 20 nights, when he could see that the award was within his reach, he called for reinforcements by getting his wife to join him for three nights, but his camping rhythm was broken and he was all out of stamina and so he and his wife left after his tent had been on the campsite for 24 nights, one night short of Marilou and Niek’s outstanding performance back in 2007. However Thomas did not realise that the fact that he had an overnight stay in Dijon on night 21, when he went to collect his wife from the bus station, he had in fact broken his consecutive stay, so his real score has to be registered at 20 nights, which drops him down to joint third place. However, this attempt shows that the record is beatable, but forward planning and stamina are needed. So come on all you world-record seekers, there is still time this season to win the award.

For more information on our campsite click here.

Crème Vichyssoise

I just love cold soups in the summer and ever since I first tasted Crème Vichyssoise at the tender age of 16, I fell in love with it. I can still remember the occasion, it was my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary and the four of us (Mum, Dad, my brother and me) went to a restaurant to celebrate. I ordered the soup and not knowing it was supposed to be cold, I was a little confused to say the least when it arrived in a cold bowl resting in a dish of ice, but just one sip and I was sold and have been ever since.

The soup comes from Vichy as the name suggests (not so far from here) and the story goes that in the 17th century Louis XIV was to be served a normal leak and potato soup but because of all the tasters and hangers-on that had to check out the safety of the food etc, by the time it reach the king himself, the soup had in fact gone cold. The king however, was delighted with this cold soup and so it has forever remained a chilled delicacy. How much more authentically French than that can you get?

Along with most really good stories this one appears to be a bit of a fabrication. Normally when these things come to light they are found to be some sort of marketing ploy, but this one is in fact an anti-marketing ploy. The soup was actually invented in 1917 in New York by Louis Diat the chef at the Ritz-Carlton - it was an instant success however, professional jealousy took hold of yet another Louis (Louis de Gouy) the chef from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He wanted to take the glory away from his great rival and so he invented the Louis XIV story and spread it far and wide, thus making this recipe forever French, but more importantly allowing him to also serve it in his restaurant !

Why not try it, here's my version of the recipe.

Ingredients.
2 leeks, finely chopped, not too much of the dark green bits
2 shallots, finely chopped
a large knob of butter
4 large potatoes, peeled and chopped into smallish pieces, keep in a bowl of water until use
1 litre chicken stock
Crème fraiche or thick sour cream
Salt and pepper
Chopped chives as garnish

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan and very gently stew the leeks and shallots until they are completely cooked. Keep the heat very low, the leeks and shallots must not brown at all.
Add the chicken stock and the drained potatoes and simmer for about 20 minutes until the potatoes are cooked right through.
Put the whole mixture into a blender or use a hand blender to blend the soup into a homogenous mix, it should be pretty thick, but a spoon should not stand up in it ! If it is too thick, add some stock, water or milk.
When the soup has cooled to about 40 degrees add two ladles of crème fraiche and stir it through until it is thoroughly mixed in, taste and add “slightly too much” salt and pepper.
Let the whole soup cool in the fridge for several hours then taste again. You will most probably have to add more salt and pepper as cold food needs more flavouring than warm food, so do not be surprised.

Serve in cold bowls with a sprinkling of chopped chives on top.

What could be better on a summer’s evening sitting in the garden eating an authentic French Crème Vichyssoise with a cold glass of the Chardonnay ?

Our gites are near Chardonnay and not too far from Vichy why not click here to see our website.

Prickly Pineapples

I have been trying to make myself a light shawl for summer evenings ever since last year. My ideal was to use pineapples (a special crochet stitch/pattern that looks like a pineapple or the “eye” on a peacock’s tail) to stretch along the length of a straight shawl, but could I find a pattern for pineapples in a straight line ? All the patterns I could find in books and on the net were all for pineapples in a circle. So I set about trying to draw out my own pattern and even to crochet small pieces to see if I could figure it out. I soon got bored. - so gone was the idea of my lovely shawl.

This spring we treated ourselves to a new sofa and I felt it looked rather plain so I decided to crochet a nice little antimacassar for the back and some arm covers, but what pattern

to use? I stumbled upon an archived version of a site called “Vintage Crochet” which had been taken down a few years ago and although the archive is not complete, many of the chair backs were still available and what did I find? A pattern for straight pineapples ! It looked so pretty as an antimacassar I decided to use that pattern and here are the results, now all I had to do was up the hook size and use wool instead of cotton thread and my long awaited shawl would materialise.

Well the pineapples are proving more tricky than I thought in wool, maybe it is because it is summer and I am not concentrating as much, but whatever it is, I seem to have to keep undoing and re-doing bits of this shawl and the other day I just put it away so that I could chill out for a bit. During my

cooling off period we had some Dutch guests in one of our gîtes and after chatting with them one day I discovered that she was very interested in patchwork, we chatted out this and that, about my crochet and she showed me pictures of her work (amazing I must say) and that was that. A couple of hours later, to my surprise she arrived at our table in the garden with a little pouch. She said she always brought something to keep her hands busy on holiday and this was for me ! It was exactly the right size for my crochet hooks, so I dashed upstairs, put my hooks in it and started back on my shawl. Do you know what? I haven’t made a mistake on this shawl since – thanks Gon for getting me going again !

Vernissage

I didn’t know what a vernissage was until I was invited by a fellow student of my French teacher to attend the opening of an art exhibition. Cees had been to a few in The Netherlands and he said it was a chance to see the paintings, meet the artist(s) and get a free glass of wine. Well how could I refuse, I mean how could I refuse the opportunity to meet great artists etc etc.

Since we have become more involved with the community and the local artists and artisans, we seem to get more and more of these invites. Sometimes the “art”, if you can even call it that, is dreadful and sometimes it can be very interesting, some are tiny events and some are huge, at one we were even entertained by a small theatre group who had created a piece especially for the occasion, in any case they are always interesting and you get to meet more and more of the local colour.

Friday evening was the first vernissage of a new local talent who was showing his work along with seven other fellow artists. I couldn’t refuse to go, after all don’t forget the free glass of wine don’t forget how interesting it will be to meet all the artists and see their work, well actually I had to supply some of the nibbles, so after making nearly 70 mini-samosas off I went into Cormatin.

The Master of Ceremonies Alain Michaud (a well established artist in his own right who held a vernissage a couple of weeks ago in a lovely old Romanesque church not far from Tournus) introduced the artists one by one, explaining their work and then the chap’s work I had come to see was introduced “And here is the work of a new artist who has been painting for less than a year, Monsieur Cees van Alderen”, lots of oohs and aahs and approving nods from the audience and so they should be impressed, his work is quite amazing for someone who first picked up a brush last September.

Then after our free glass(es) of wine and nibbles we left for home and a takeaway pizza to celebrate a successful evening. Now all we have to do is wait for the millions to roll in !

La Tuilerie Website

Wine Bottles

Wine is big business round here. Cormatin itself used to have vineyards on the hillside where the Garage de Bougogne now stands, on the road to Saint-Gengoux-le-National,

and the main street in Cormatin used to have wine makers, wine merchants, a wine barrel maker and a distillery which made Marc de Bourgogne out of the leftovers of the grapes after the juice has been pressed out of them. Even La Tuilerie had its own little vineyard on the other side of the Chazelle – Chazeux road. The wine was made using the winepress that still stands in the old tile drying shed. To hear the stories from older neighbours, Monsieur Martin’s wine was legendary round here for being truly undrinkable ! Maybe it is good that his winemaking technique and recipes were not passed on to us with the deeds of the house.

We buy our most of our wine in the Cave Cooperative in Saint-Gengoux-le-National and we even have a loyalty card with them which they stamp every time we spend 30 Euros.

On the fifth lot of 30 Euros you get a bottle of Côte Chalonaise, on the 16th you get a magnum (1.5 litres) of the same and so it goes on with various gifts increasing in value until with the 50th stamp you get 3 bottles of vintage Premier Cru. Just imagine how upset I was when we got within two stamps of this prize and some nasty so and so pinched my purse in Barcelona with the loyalty card in it when we were on holiday a couple of years ago and all that loyalty was lost in one fell swoop and what is more annoying whoever pinched it didn’t even get the wine.

In the cave in Saint-Gengoux they have a number of the larger bottles lined up near the cash desk and I always look at them and wonder what they are called and how big they are, whilst waiting in the queue to pay. When we made a visit to the tiny Musée du Tonnelier (a museum about barrel making) in one of the little cobbled back-streets in Saint Gengoux the other day, I saw on display a row of all the sizes of bottles used around here and I was quite thrilled to finally see all their names and their sizes; so here is the list:

Melchior, Nebuchadnezzar, Balthazar, Salmanazar, Methuselah, Jeroboam, Magnum, Bottle, Fillette, Chopine. Respectively 24, 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2 , 1/3 of a bottle. How the heck one would pour a Melchior at 18 kg of liquid plus the weight of the bottle is beyond me. When I was checking the English spellings of these bottles, I spotted that Champagne bottles go up even bigger, right up to Melchizedek at 40 bottles or 30 litres, you would need a fork lift truck to get that one off the ground.

I don’t think we will be buying any of the big bottles very soon, although on our next visit we are due to receive a Magnum of some sort or another, but we still have to wait at least another 20 stamps before we finally get to taste the Premier Cru.

For more information about the holiday houses we have to rent see La Tuilerie website.

Lavoirs

Sunday afternoon we went out on another organised randonée in the nearby village of Chissey-les-Mâcon and it was a themed walk similar to the one in Chapaize, only this time the theme was “lavoirs”. Lavoirs are abundant in this region and they are the places where the womenfolk used to do their washing. They are considered to be part of the national heritage and are mostly well maintained.

There are very big lavoirs like the one in St Gengoux-le-Nationale which could have catered for maybe 80 women at one time and right at the other end of the scale, the tiny one in Chazelle only had space for about four. Each one is unique and a tour of lavoirs is well worth the effort, particularly when you tumble upon ones like the superb little octagonal lavoir in Bissy-sous-Uxelles, quite a gem.

Lavoirs are often used for events like this one. When we first came to Burgundy, one weekend in May, there was a driving tour of local lavoirs organised by “Les Belles de Mai”

(a group of female artisans) who had decorated about 12 of the larger lavoirs around here and they had exhibited and were selling their work - great fun and a pity it was never repeated. Sunday’s walk passed quite a few lavoirs and similar to the other tour, local artists had decorated the lavoirs and were selling their work and amateur gardeners had constructed little gardens near them with descriptions of the plants in the little beds. Quite a lot of forethought and organisation went into this event and it is so nice to see these interesting buildings still being used even if is not for their original purpose.

The walks were rather unusually graded by the amount of time they would take rather than their length in km. The short walk, which was half the length of the medium walk, was said to take 2.5 hours and the medium walk should take 3 hours but in fact it took us only 1.5 hours, obviously we didn’t spend enough time admiring the artwork !

La Tuilerie Website

Walking in Burgundy

Walking is a very popular sport in this area. There are many small, safe paths, the terrain is not too mountainous that it puts you off starting, the views of the vineyards and the forested areas are well worth any effort you have to put in, but above all else on most Sundays from April to October, there are organised walks. These walks (randonnées) are laid out by the village and they range from the super slick huge walks like Chardonnay, where many thousands take part, to the tiny village walks which probably attracted a dozen or so.

The first walk we did this year was in Chapaize a couple of weeks ago, we were mainly attracted by the fact that it was a walk that went past a number of interesting sites and we were promised a lot of historical detail about those sites en-route. Sure enough when we arrived to start we were given a little booklet filled with lots of interesting information about the things we would see along the way and a map to show the route. The walk was 15km mostly off-road with the farthest point being Chappelle-sous-Brancion and because of the terrain it should not take much more than 4 hours. We started later than we would have liked, meaning we would have to have a very late lunch, but that would be more than compensated by what there was to see. Things started to go wrong less than 1km into the walk when we could not find the correct path into the forest, but we know our way around here and rather than walk up and down the road too many times looking for the hidden entrance, we would just go into the forest, find the lake and go from there. That worked

and we found the trail again. When we reached a T-junction where it was quite clear on our map that we should turn right, the indicators said left. We were confused to say the least. We turned right assuming that the left-hand indicators were for the shorter walk. Not a good move as we ended up in brambles and stinging nettles and even had to crawl on the ground to get under some overhanging branches, it was at that point we decided we might not be going the right way. Back to the T-junction and follow the indicators, which showed no sign of following the map we were given. When we came to the road and the indicators said to turn right (direction Brancion so they were probably correct) we decided to abort mission and go home. We had taken 2 hours to cover about 3km of a 15km walk and had by now lost faith in the indicators, the clinching factors were that it was lunch time and it had started to rain. It appears we were not the only ones who had not found the path into the forest and when I said that the map and the indicators did not match, the guy in charge said “Oh we know that, we decided to change the route”. Ummm. One person had made it back after completing the whole walk but I am not sure how many others did the whole thing.

So when some friends came round and told us they had been setting out new walks for their village walk this weekend, we thought we would give it another a go. With a bit of a giggle we were told that the short walk would surprise some people. The short walk (between 5 and 10km usually) is normally walked by the serious wimps and is a doddle, not so in this case we were told.

So off we set on Sunday morning to see how little of a doddle it was. Well the walk started as it meant to go on, up hill and up hill and up hill with the final haul being the notorious climb near la Moutonnerie that used to be part of the Cormatin 20km walk. As we all know "what goes up must come down" and boy did this walk go down, at one point I thought I would have to go down on my bottom it was so steep ! So we made it to the other side of the hill, yes the OTHER side. That meant we would have to do it all again to get back to our car. Back we went up and up, then down the final haul into town to be rewarded by some absolutely delicious pizza pieces.

We did not get lost once, at no time did we ever feel that we didn’t know which was the right way to go and apart from the road in the village and a small stretch in Blanot, we spent all our time exclusively off-road on some beautiful paths through forests, fields and vineyards. The views were stunning and even though my legs are regretting it today, it was well worth it. Bravo to the Foyer Rural de Cortambert for a superbly organised event and where did you get that pizza ?

La Tuilerie Website

Baby Booties

We do our supermarket shopping on a Tuesday and then we go on to have lunch in Cluny town centre. The place we have eaten for the last year and a bit, when our favourite Cass' Crout' shut down because the owner retired, is La Petite Auberge run by a relatively young husband and wife team who have managed to come up with a different plat du jour every Tuesday we have been there except on about 3 occasions. Not being too observant, it took us sometime to notice that the usually very slim wife was getting fatter and fatter around the middle and then some more time to figure out she might, just might, be expecting. When the restaurant was shut on a Tuesday a couple of weeks ago with a notice saying it was closed “due to exceptional circumstances” and would reopen in a couple of days, it was not too difficult, even for us, to figure out that a baby had arrived.

We were treated to a visit of mother and child the following Tuesday and given a glass of Crémant to wet the baby’s head.

Well I couldn’t resist it I just had to make some booties, never having had kids of my own so no chance of grandchildren, this was my opportunity!

So here they are the lovely pink booties taken from this website Mon petit Violon crochet and kit designs. So thanks Vita for sharing your pattern, let’s hope they fit.

La Tuilerie Website

It is Official - Cees is Ancient !

This year Cees received an invitation for the “Repas des Anciens”. A free meal given to all the old folk in town. When you reach a “certain age” your name gets added to the list of participants and Cees’ time had come this year. Interestingly we are members of the group that organise and run this meal (the Amicale de Cormatin) so we were closely involved in all the preparations, but we ducked out when it came to asking for volunteers to do the work on the day.

We had been planning and preparing for weeks, with the usual French style and to us a somewhat chaotic approach, but everything came together on the day despite all the arguments over whether we should have beef or duck and which wine should be bought. As treasurer I was sent out to buy the chosen wine and I was very pleased to note that the white wine brought huge compliments, but the Mayor (sitting opposite me at the dinner) didn’t like the red wine he had personally chosen and insisted we should buy, which made me giggle rather.

We made table arrangements in tune with the time of year and a suitably Easter-ish theme was chosen and doesn’t that little chick that I suggested we buy as a joke look so cute. I really must stop my attempts at humour and sarcasm in French, they really do take me too literally sometimes.

We were treated to an aperitif, terrine de lapin, paupette de saumon (bouchée à la reine for the non-fish eaters like me), trou Bourguignon (cassis sorbet with Marc de Bourgogne the local fire water), cuisse de canette with gratin dauphinois, assiette de fromage or faisselle and Délice de Cormatin a special dessert from one of the bakers in town, all washed down with the appropriate wine. White wine - Mâcon Villagees Clos de Mont-Rachet 2009, red wine - Bourgogne Pinot Noir Buissonnier 2008 and crément - Crément de Bourgogne Blanc de Blancs all from the local cave, Vignerons de Buxy and then of course coffee and digestif.

They know how to do free meals round here.

Even though the meal was a month ago, I waited until today to publish this story because now it is official!

La Tuilerie Website

Parking in Cluny

Parking in Cluny is a tricky business. They introduced desperately needed new parking areas during 2010 to cater for the expected rise in tourists and then promptly removed them, recovered them or turned them into paid parking as soon as the event was over. The staff of ENSAM (the Grand Ecole for engineers) have taken over about 150 new spaces from April to the end of August while their own car park is being repaired, paid parking has been introduced in the car park where we normally park on a Saturday, the old car park near the Equivallée has been turned into a bus area and the “brand new” car park near the bus area is nothing more than an old car park with new markings and fewer spaces. In total about 250 parking spaces have been lost since the new year and 60 previously free spaces have become paid parking.

So last Saturday when we arrived to go to the now much bigger summer market and a horse championship was in full flight as well as the ENSAM students still in residence (plus the fact that the place was heaving with tourists) there was nowhere to park at all. As we were waiting for a bus to get out of the way (he couldn’t find a space either) we saw someone nip out of a space, in we went. Phew, that’s that sorted. OK yes I knew it was a bus space but all’s fair in love and parking. Well no it isn’t actually, when we had been to the market we returned to find the road cordoned off by the police who were ticketing everyone who had had the audacity to think they could park in these spaces which used to be car spaces but had now been confiscated by the buses. Blocked in at one end by the police and the other end by a bus, we had no escape. In any case we now know how to pay a parking fine.

So just a little word of warning about parking if you go into Cluny, if there is a big sign saying buses only it will cost you 11 Euros the first time you park there, it will cost 35 Euros the second time, 68 Euros for the third offence and 195 Euros for a fourth, that makes 20c an hour for paid parking sound rather cheap.

La Tuilerie Website

How to Wash Your Car in a Drought

There is officially a drought in France and in Saône-et-Loire water restrictions are now in place. That means no watering

the garden with a hose and no car washing. Just imagine my excitement when it rained a couple of evenings ago ! It was 5mm in total and as the rain came thumping down in great big juicy blobs I had a brainwave, why not use the stuff falling out of the sky to wash the car. So I donned my trusty raincoat and set to work with a sponge and doesn’t our new clean car look all the better for it !

La Tuilerie Website

Le Château de Cormatin

A common “fact” often quoted around here is that the château in Cormatin is the most visited tourist site in our département (Saône-et-Loire). I don’t know what people base this information on and whilst I have happily passed on this “fact” to others as true, I have always had my doubts about it. Even though you often see a whole row of tourist buses outside the château, if you see the number of tourists hanging around in Cluny it is difficult to imagine that more tourists visit our little town than visit Cluny abbey.

The other day we saw a little article in the paper with the actual figures for 2010 and here you have it:

1 - Touroparc a zoo in Romanèche-Thorins just south of Mâcon : 190,315 visitors.
2 - The Abbey in Cluny : 152,809 visitors
3 - Parc des Combes a fun park in Le Creusot : 137,000 visitors.
4 - Hameau Duboeuf a wine centre in Romanèche-Thorins : 110,517 visitors.
5 - Paray-le-Monial pilgrim centre : 73,283 visitors.
6 - Château de Cormatin : 60,698 visitors.
7 - Bibracte an archeological park in Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray in the Morvan : 43,179 visitors.

The figures for Cluny are slightly distorted as there were a huge number of visitors who came to Cluny for the 2010 celebrations. In a normal year they have just over 100,000 visitors.

So there you have it folks, our château may not be the most visited tourist site in Saône-et-Loire, but it is certainly the most visited château in Saône-et-Loire.

This got me thinking about how many tourists actually visit our tiny little town each year, let’s forget the hundreds of thousands who walk down from Taizé for a moment and just stick with the château figures. We have a whopping great 120 visitors for every resident - no wonder you have to fight for a seat on a terrace in the summer!

La Tuilerie Website

Visit into the Bresse

Yesterday we decided to enjoy the wonderful weather and go into the Bresse to visit the monastery at Brou just outside Bourg-en-Bresse. As usual for a Friday morning Cees went off into Cormatin on his bike to get the newspaper and a baguette so that we could enjoy our English breakfast French-style and read the paper before setting off. He did, mention that it was very busy in the newsagent, but further no news from town.

On looking at the front page of the newspaper, I was a little confused about the joyous proclamation that announced that it was Friday 13th. Not something you would see on an English or a Dutch newspaper, there you would read stories of all the awful things that might happen during the coming day unless you were very careful indeed. Not that I am superstitious you understand, but I did think twice about our big day out. On reading further into the article I discovered that there are between one and three Friday 13ths every year and each one is a cause for celebration, all the more exciting this year because there is only one such day. The vast majority of the population in France think that a Friday 13th is a very lucky day indeed, hence the excited article in the newspaper and the queue of people in the newsagent buying lottery tickets on this day, to improve their chances of winning. So maybe our outing was not doomed at all.

In fact we had a tremendous day out, we went to the Musée de la Bresse, Domaine de Planons, part of which is a renovated 15th century farm fully furnished, with all its outbuildings complete, animals in the various pens and vegetables growing in the vegetable plot. We thought we would just “pop in” on our way to Bourg-en-Bresse, but it was so interesting we stayed a long time and we have not even scratched the surface of what there is to see there. We will definitely be going back later this year for a full morning or afternoon to explore the place properly and to see all the exhibits.

After a huge lunch in a Routier restaurant (my first ever!) we went on to the monastery. We had visited this place on our first visit to this area, when we stayed on a camping à la ferme near Villefranche, which must have been 12 – 15 years ago, back in the days when we only dreamed of doing what we now do. We were not disappointed with our return visit. The church is exquisitely decorated and is a perfect textbook example of Flamboyant Gothic. The whole place was built in a record time of less than 20 years, but sadly the commissioner (Margaret of Austria) died whilst living in Belgium three months before it was completed and she never saw the buildings herself. The monastery element (three cloisters and surrounding buildings) are impressive in their size, but they lack the simple elegance of the Romanesque style we are so fond of. But no matter what, this place is really well worth all the Michelin stars it gets.

All in all a very successful day out and a very enjoyable Friday 13th - maybe I will be bit more French about that date now - but it will take a lot more for me to believe that you have to hang horseshoes upside-down for good luck..

La Tuilerie Website

The Camping Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down !

The campsite is not yet officially opened for the 2011 season and yet there has been a very brave attempt to smash the record for the longest number of tent nights in one stay! Janine and Mijntje have managed to clock up 31 tent nights by using all of their strategic planning skills. Their record breaking attempt was slightly thwarted by one of their party who dived into a gite at the last minute thus losing them an extra 4 nights and their careless removal of one tent for the last night, lost them another. The way they managed this feat will not be revealed in this blog so that other campers cannot ride on the back of their ingenuity, but it must be said that bribing the judges with corenwijn and peanut butter was a masterstroke of genius. It was however, with great regret that we had to inform Janine and Mijntje that they had slightly misunderstood the rules associated with category 1 of the camping championship, these tent nights need to be consecutive. So the record of 25 consecutive nights set by Marilou and Niek and held by them for 4 years, still stands.

Having said that it was felt that the incredible effort put in by this pair needed to be rewarded, so the first ever “Judges’ Discretionary Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Camping in Cormatin, Taizé and Surroundings” has been presented to Janine and Mijntje! Congratulations!

The judges are a little disappointed that the girls are not building on their success by holidaying in France this summer and in view of the fact that they now only just share the lead for both the most cumulative tent nights (category 2) and the most number of separate visits (category 3), they are unlikely to head either of these categories by the end of the season.

Marlotte, Jan-Luuk, Annaloes, Jeanine and Johan are returning this summer and with their world famous ability to clock up tent nights, they will most probably retain their lead in Category 2 but there are others who could also charge ahead with the right strategy. Category 3 is the most open category at the moment, Hans and Joke were the leaders last year and only have to visit once this summer to re-take the outright lead, however there are others who could move up to pole position with a little effort. So this could be the category to watch this year and records could be broken by the person or persons who really put their mind to it.

In any case the competition is hotting up in 2011 and we are looking forward to seeing new and old campers alike rise to the challenge.

For those interested in the results of last year's competition click here and for more information about the campsite and more pictures go to La Tuilerie Website.

Sarkosy Calls for more Rain

It rained last night - 5 mm- the first real rain for 28 days, we had half a millimetre fall out of the sky a couple of times last week as thunderstorms rolled by, but no real rain. The ground has cracks the size you normally see in August and France is entering a drought. We shouldn’t get too excited of course this 5mm does not come very close to making up for the 50mm shortfall in April.

Having said that it has been a fantastic April for the tourists to the area and the people in our gîtes have enjoyed sunbathing in temperatures of 27 degrees. I think the campers this morning were less grateful though. But one man is jumping with joy this morning and that is our wonderful leader Mr Sarkosy.

Why? I hear you say, because he is worried about the farmers? because he is worried about water shortages? Of course not – now he can try out his new umbrella. Yes the President has a new umbrella delivered at the end of March and it has hardly rained since.

But this is not just any old umbrella, this one cost €10,000 (yes, ten thousand Euros) and he didn’t just buy one either, he seems to have bought a whole bunch, but who he bought the others for was not reported in the papers.

The umbrella even has a special name to go with the special price it is called a ParaPactum. It weighs in at 2.2kg as opposed to 500g which a normal everyday umbrella weighs and it is made from Kevlar ! It is designed to protect our leader not only from the rain but from “falling rocks, knives, ice-pick blows and acid” according to news sources.

For the moment though, he will just have to be content with our measly 5mm of precipitation.

La Tuilerie Website