Touring

I took Sue and Jon on a little driving tour of the drome, stopping first at Mazenc to walk around the old town. There's not too much to see there, but there is an interesting old communal bread oven. From there, we started driving south to Grignan. Along the way, we saw signs for goats cheese, which we dutifully followed and ended up at a newish looking farm house with... no one home. We turned the opel around and on our way out, a sleepy looking guy followed by a border collie came out of a house and flagged us down. It turned out that he was the cheese guy, and he led us back to the cheese barn, told us which door to go in, and appeared 5 minutes later smartly dressed in a lab coat, gloves and boots. He also was carrying three large trays full of goats cheeses in varying states of "ripeness". After talking to him for a while and buying a box full of cheese, he took us to see his herd of goats, which were apparently of Swiss origin. He also told us that some Americans from Colorado had been out to his farm earlier in the year to see his set up, since they were interested in trying to make their own goats cheese. We got a scary call from Chloes mom about "not flying", but the phone reception cut out before we could determine what was happening. A few minutes of french radio brought the news of the simultaneous attacks on the London subways and buses. Our mood a bit depressed, we continued on to Grignan, and walked along the ramparts, had coffee, and then hit the road again. We pulled into "Domaine de Lumian", and tasted their full range of wines several of which were excellent. From there, we made one final stop near Nyons for olive oil, which Jon and Sue bought us a bottle of as a present, and excellent olives. After a failed attempt to buy goats cheese at a small farm (the same place that had supplied the excellent cheeses to the Gite), we drove back to the gite.