Driving to Ste. Enimie
We had planned a big weekend in the Gorges du Tarn, but the route which we would take wasn't at all obvious. France is crisscrossed by a network of roads of varying size and twistiness (important when both Chloe and I get car sick) which go from the autoroute, to the route nationale down to the frequently nauseating but charming departmentale. Having had several trips where we realized afterwards that we had missed out on something very interesting because we were zooming along at 140 kph on the autoroute, I planned our last major trip in france very carefully. I first consulted the plus beaux villages de France web site and discovered that with only a few small deviations we could drive through two of the 149 plus beaux villages de France: Arlempdes and Pradelles, both in the Haute Loire. After a few hours on the autoroute and the excellent N88 south from Ste. Etienne, Chloe spotted an interesting church on a hilltop in Le-puy-en-Velay, so we decided to check it out.
We paid the admission fee and walked up the stairs to the chapel, which was not easy after a week of intestinal hell. It's amazing how badly a stomach flu can hobble you.
the other dominant feature of the le Puy skyline is the kind of ugly Notre Dame statue. A quick look with the binoculars was definitely close enough for us. That's it behind me on the left
and a close up from the web site:
some fun tidbits from the official website (above): baby Jesus' head weighs 1100 kilograms and his arms weigh 600 kilos. That's a big fricken baby jesus.
From le Puy, we continued on the N88 and a small departmental to get to the hamlet of Arlempdes. The village was underwhelming; it has a nice castle on a cliff
which is being poorly restored and some nice houses, but it is otherwise unremarkable by french standards. The only interesting things were the cowardly dog that made a few half hearted attempts to attack us (I discovered that a fully extended tripod works well to discourage such attacks), and the crazy guy. The Crazy Guy was a middle aged local who had set up a network of ferret cages near the base of the castle, with terracing that led to another much bigger netted enclave for tropical birds. He was industriously running back and forth to the village to find more garbage to burn on his bonfire when we left the village.
on to Pradelles.
Well, it's possible that we missed the beautiful part, but Pradelles seems pretty ugly to us. So ugly in fact, that after a cursory look around from the parking lot, we sped off towards Mende. Mende is like several other towns that I've been to in France where there is a one way ring road around the city, but much smaller than the peripherique roads in Paris and Lyon. I happened to be looking at a detailed map of the area later on in this trip and realized that these roads are probably where the ancient walls of the city were. Turning them into a one way ring road is actually a pretty good idea. We took a break in Mende to look around and found that it had some really cool little alleyways, and beautiful government buildings as well as a large chapel. All were built from a yellowish tan kind of stone that I hadn't seen before
We had a nasty surprise when, driving out of Mende, we saw signs that the road that we needed to take to the Gorges du Tarn were closed! Some quick re-routing by chloe led us onto a nice straight departmentale across the plains that lead to the gorge. Along the way we got stuck behind some sheep
before we descended into Ste. Enimie. Thinking that we had actually made hotel reservations in La Malene, we continued on, discovered that was no "Hotel Deux Sources" in La Malene and drove back to Ste. Enimie. The hotel turned out to be grim indeed:
and after wiping the dead flies off of the sheets and the shelf above the sink in the bathroom we decided it was in our best interest to eat elsewhere. The Auberge du Moulin looked a lot nicer, and we had an ok but very greasy meal of trout and some other forgettable things. The chestnut cake with homemade ice cream was good though. No we are not spoiled.
We watched a little TV, and discovered to our surprise that there was a full Occitan version of the news with French subtitles. This was on a regular TV channel, not cable access or OcTV. Googling reveals that more than 2 million people speak it, that the languages called "Provencale" is actually a dialect of Occitan, that it shares linguistic origins with Catalan, and that there is actually an Occitane wikipedia.
We were woken up several times by someone with their TV blaring and I had to go bang on their door until my hands hurt.
