Two Adventurers

8 November 2009 France

For our second night here we needed to move to another room and were given a huge one upstairs with its own lounge! It was beautifully decorated and with an exquisite white embroidered bed cover on the king size bed. A free standing carved wardrobe  held soft dressing gowns for our use.

I forgot to mention that yesterday we paid a visit to a stunning vineyard in Saint-Puy, the Chateau de Monluc, which has been producing wonderful wines and champagne for centuries. We were given guidebooks in English to read while walking through the wine cellar, however a group of French tourists, upon leaving the cellar, were thoughtless enough to turn the lights out and lock the door on us. We both immediately started yelling for them to let us out as it was pitch black inside and we could not see a foot in front of ourselves! Luckily for us, in a minute or two their tour guide returned, opened the door and told us to hurry up. We then only had time to have a quick look at the heavily dust-covered bottles of very old champagne lying in nests of 52 bottles in a special crate, so that their necks were angled down in order to collect the sediment. After several months of rotating the crates the cap of each bottle was released to allow the sediment to escape and at the same time a gas was introduced and the bottle recapped. Heaven only knows how long we’d have been in there if they had not heard us yelling!  We re-entered the Chateau where we were permitted to sample their Brut champagne from 2006, which was a delight to the palate.

After taking a few photos of La Lumiane Guest House from a few angles, we bid our lovely hosts farewell, packed up the car and taking a southern route from Saint-Puy, drove off in the direction of  Ausch, a reasonable sized town and from there east back to Toulouse. The wet weather now seems to have left us and to the east and north are blue skies. The next morning we will collect our daughter, Simone, from the Toulouse airport, when she flies in from London to spend a few days with us. We are really looking forward to seeing her again. We will be staying in the Etap Hotel, a small boutique hotel which is part of the Accor chain, which is right in the airport complex, so that we can be there bright and early to collect Simone.