Not only did the landscape change but so has the architecture of the older buildings within villages. Again, we are treated to seeing wonderful “back in time” half timbered houses and buildings similar to what we had seen in Brittany. Reading about the history of this region, we learn it didn’t become part of France until the late 18th century, often lending its support to the English kings in battle against France. This is probably why we see this type of architecture in the old medieval cities. Religion also played a huge role as the villages all have beautiful churches, many with tall steeples so everyone would be able to find where the church was, often in the center of the town. Similar to other European cities – Spain, Italy and Portugal, the churches are beautiful.
As we were traveling through the small town of Aubigny-St-Nere we noticed the weekly market was underway. We decided to stop and see what was available. We decided to buy poulet roti, et pommes de terre rotis as well as some fresh veggies and fruit. We made our way down the pedestrian only street bordered on either side by old half-timbered buildings, some in great shape and some with a bit of a lean. As we make our way down the street, the market stalls are starting to pack up, so we went in search of a bakery for some fresh bread as well as some treats. The street near the bakery was humming with the locals sitting out enjoying drinks, conversation and lunch. We found the needed bakery, bought our goodies and then headed to a picnic table we had seen and had a picnic.
While driving we have noticed that there are plants that seem to grow alongside the trees that make the edge of the forest look like a sculptured wall, all natural.
We drove over to Auxerre where we picked up some groceries for the next few days. It’s the capital of this department, Yonne (department being the French term for what is likely called a county at home). We had to drive about 30 km to arrive in Noyers. Our accommodation, La Petit Poche, is a part of an old building, which has been renovated. We had experienced a torrential downpour when we were coming out of the store and later in the evening, the sky opened up to another deluge of rain. The gite’s ceiling in J’s room leaked – resulting in some damp clothing! We’ll do some laundry in the morning. We’ll have to let the management company know about the leak – don’t think it’s the first time based on what we see in the gite’s guestbook.
Sunday, May 6, 2012 – Today we decided to kick back after yesterday’s drive. We had a late breakfast. After lunch we went for a walk to explore the village of Noyers. We had no idea that the center village was from medieval times. This village is small with many old buildings – lending to the thought – do people live in all of these or are a bunch empty? We really enjoy wandering the old cobbled streets and checking out the old buildings. We’ll have to do some checking of the age of this village – as we don’t have any history on the place. There’s a gateway into the old centre with a clock tower attached.
There are a number of shops and restaurants that are in the old town for people to enjoy. Many places are closed as today is Sunday. We wander around for a while and check out some of the alleys and old pathways. The clouds are moving in, so we decide to head back before the rain begins yet again. We could see as we are walking how high the streams and waterways are around here. We made it back in time before the rain started. We read another chapter of The Call of The Wild a great story that we are all enjoying.
While prepping for dinner, T looked down on the floor and saw a bunch of ants near our bag of supplies that was on the floor. Quickly finding some bug spray, M went to work killing the ants – not the first time we’ve encountered ants, but the first time they’ve gotten into our stuff. Counter space is a premium in this place, so we resorted to leaving a bag of supplies on the floor. So after the ant battle (making M think back to fairy tale stories “killed 7 with a single blow”), he washed our supplies that the ants had walked on and sprayed around to try to prevent any more ant invasions. Later, we found a TV channel which ket us change Hawaii Five 0 to English for the evenings entertainment.
Monday, May 7, 2012 – On our way to Geneva today to see our friend, Marc. We decided this would be the closest we would be to him, the last chance for awhile to see Switzerland again, and some time to see more of Geneva. Our drive would take just over three hours. We chose to do the auto route as it was the fastest way and most direct. Noyers is 10 km off A6 that took us southeast past Beaune until Macon, where we basically headed due east. The Bourgogne countryside is beautiful rolling hills, with beautiful statuesque churches, some chateaux, mostly agricultural and some forestry. We could see many large wineries and industry related to wine passing by Beaune. The topography changed to tree covered mountains soon after Macon.
As we traveled through the pass toward Switzerland, we recognized the valley as we had traveled the year before on the TGV from Paris to Naples (via Geneve/Milan). The highway was perched on viaducts along the mountainside for quite a distance and we had taken pictures of this road system from far below whole sitting in the train. Cool to be doing this pass again – which is very beautiful.
The French border is basically on the edge of the city of Geneve. This time we made sure we purchased the year pass for the Swiss autoroutes – 40CH. We had traveled through this country last year many times without one and had never been stopped. (Had no idea at the time that a pass was required). However, after our nasty surprise of being fined big time leaving Austria for not having one, we wanted to make sure we were law abiding!
The weather was great today, with broken cloud and no rain – even though it was forecasted for some – YES! We drove to our hotel, Novotel in the centre of the city and after a rather interesting drive through the city core we parked until we left the city. The streets are lined with various lanes: one for bus and taxi, another for bikes, yet another for cars all having arrows with various directions – making for visual overload, and added to that the taxis and buses seem to have different rules for traffic lights! We did manage to find our way and had to ignore Navi a couple of times to follow the signage painted on the roadways. It was quite something.
Our hotel was right in the midst of the core, not far from the lakefront. We enjoyed a stroll around and found a restaurant for lunch.
A great lunch we had – and oh yes, we were back into the land of ridiculous pricing! A bottle of water at the table 11CH (about 12 Can). Oh well, we were celebrating J’s birthday. Lunch was a delicious affair and then we headed out to find the tram. Our hotel had a free transportation pass and we took advantage of it. Our aim this afternoon was to go to the United Nations site here in Geneva. The tram took us right near there and we managed to find the buildings where we could go for a tour. Along the walk we saw some cool stuff, including this "high" chair.
It was 3:15 and the next English tour was at 4 – so we were in luck. We got our visitor badge and proceeded to the building where the tour was going to take place.
It was a very informative hour and half with a great tour guide who explained the functions of the UN in Geneva. Basically it is the headquarters for four factions – human rights commission, world health, disarmament, and refugee services. We were able to visit various chambers including the human rights commission with its fabulous ceiling, as well as the 1939 League of Nations chamber where today peace talks take place. The hallways were like an art gallery with various presents or art from member countries – some magnificent pieces to admire. Pretty neat to walk amongst the halls and chambers where some important world matters have been discussed and settled. A very informative and well worth visit for all three of us.
Check out the cool ceiling, done by a Spanish artist to represent the sea floor.
Nice view, that's Mont Blanc shrouded in cloud at the end of the valley.
We caught the tram back to the stop near the hotel and got some work done on the net before meeting Marc for dinner at 7:30. We went for dinner at Restaurant Duo and had a wonderful evening telling tales of our adventure as well as catching up with him - great to see our friend. We headed back to the hotel just after 11pm.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 – Today’s J’s 11th birthday. Not being home to have a party with his friends and cousins was a bit disappointing for him, but he was a trooper about it. We met with Marc again this morning and got a bit of a tour of Old Geneva. M had his first encounter with someone trying to pickpocket him with the “drop the ring on the ground trick”. It was not hard to see what the guy was trying to do, and we quickly moved on as did the crook! Our host was quite disgusted. We visited the commemorative wall on the grounds of the University of Geneva of the history of the city of Geneva as well as important historical events – very interesting.
We had lunch with our friend then said goodbye, as it was time for us to head back to France. Taking the cab back we found out it was a national holiday in France and hence the streets in Geneva are much quieter than usual. We were told 75 000 French residents come to work in Geneva daily, this was not surprising to us as Marc had said was very expensive to live in (he doesn’t live there either, just works there). The drive out of the city was much less confusing today. We decided to take a different route back so we could see a different area. We headed along the lake toward Lausanne until we reached the town of Nyon. We made sure to stop in Nyon for groceries since everything will be closed in France. J asked for Pizza for his birthday dinner, so we needed to pick up a few things we needed for J’s birthday supper.
We headed over the pass climbing quite a distance up to 1150 m through a series of switchbacks up into the hills high over Lake Geneva.
We traveled through some great little villages, like St. Cergue and La Cure into France. It was very wooded and as soon as we crossed the border the Swiss alpine house architecture changed to the typical tan/beige plaster of France. The road was windy and fairly narrow, but with little traffic. We enjoyed the drive down into the valley below.
We drove north along an autoroute through Dijon onto our village. We didn’t stop in Dijon as it was getting close to dinner-time, it was raining, and we already had some Dijon mustard in the fridge.
We had a great dinner of thin crusted pesto salami, ham, mushroom, cheese pizza – tasty and of course we had a small chocolate birthday cake. Later we sat around and J picked the movie Marley and Me to watch as our evening movie and enjoy a bowl of popcorn. We had never seen Owen Wilson act in anything but comedies, and were pleased to find this a wonderful family movie.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 – Today’s adventure was to go check a few towns out around Noyers to see what we could see. It’s sunny today and the temperature is climbing as the day progresses. We drove to Chablis (about 25 km from here) to enjoy a glass of Chablis and a delicious a lunch (including escargots bourgogne) at Le Bistrot de Grand Crus. There were numerous wineries (some quite large) we could have stopped to visit and gone for a tasting, but decided not to. We did however really enjoy our glass we had with lunch. After the typical long French lunch, as we left Chablis the hills were full of vines for the Chablis wine industry in this little town.
Oh and we checked, all the yellow fields are canola (not mustard).
Oh and we checked, all the yellow fields are canola (not mustard).
We decided to head to Auxerre to check out an art gallery, as well as the cathedral, and take a drive through the center of town. Yet again, we find it’s a great city to check out, lots of old architecture, narrow streets, and picturesque. Definitely could see there’s history here. Also there are three wonderful gothic churches that oversee the river that flows through town. We parked the car and enjoyed walking through a couple of streets to check out the largest cathedral. It’s huge gothic arched interior is quite bare in décor, with the exception of stain glassed windows way up high.
The exterior has some wonderful stone sculptures and carvings, however, a number of the heads of figures have been broken off. Not sure when that happened. There was an awesome pipe organ that someone was playing – a great sound – not long enough. We checked out the art gallery, but it didn’t have anything we were interested in. We stopped at the Intermarché to get some groceries for the remainder of the week.
We left Auxerres to head 54 km southwest to Vezelay. It has a UNESCO designated church, that is at the top of this hilltop village. It’s a wonderful combination of rampart walls, narrow cobbled streets, walled homes, old buildings, lilac trees in full bloom giving off a wonderful scent in the air all adding to a wonderful atmosphere. The church, Basilica of Ste. Madeleine, built by the monks , saying that the remains of Mary Magdelene were buried here (we both questioned if that would have actually been true – yet that is the story). It was a major pilgrimage church similar to Santiago Compostale in Spain that we had been to in March. The exterior of the church was very elaborate while the interior of the church was very austere – common for abbeys. The stone sculptures and statues were stories of Jesus’ life. Again, the ceilings were really high in gothic style, the altar area was well light naturally.
We found a great art gallery just outside of the cathedral. The artist Denis Canut, was present and his oil paintings were wonderful. It was wonderful to enjoy looking at all of his works. We found an oil painting that both of us really liked and decided to buy it. It’s a wonderful view of a scene within Vezelay. It reminded us of so many wonderful scenes we have come across on our travels through this beautiful country.
Arrived back home to see more ants on the floor! Good thing there’s some insect killer spray that we put to good use to rid ourselves of today’s pests!
Thursday, May 10, 2012 – It’s a beautiful morning, temperature to reach up to 28 C. Today’s drive didn’t take us more than 50 km, but we checked out a couple of sites as well as enjoy another great lunch, this time we were able to eat bouef bourguignon – a regional specialty that we wanted to try and were very pleased that we had. We stopped for lunch in a small village prior to heading onto the Fontenay Abbey, another UNESCO site.
Fontenay is out in the country without anything else around. Founded by St. Bernard in 1118, it’s one of the oldest Cistercian abbeys. Before they could settle here, they had to do a great deal of work to prep the land as it was quite water-logged. Their monastic life observed strict Benedictine Rule – especially virtues of poverty and solitude. They survived on a daily loaf of bread and some wine. Today the abbey is privately owned and some of the buildings and grounds are open to the public for viewing. The whole atmosphere is very peaceful and serene. The grounds are meticulously maintained, yet devoid of any colour other than green shrubs, trees, vines, and grass.
The Church was very basic on the exterior as well as inside. It had the huge gothic arches and dirt floor. Connected to this we wandered through the dormitory where the monks slept on straw mattresses separated by low partitions. Next we entered the arcades of the cloister with an impressive courtyard, here the monks prayed and read. Walking through the archways, one could feel the serenity of the place.
They were quite industrious, as we saw the first hydraulic hammer ever made, this monastery foundry is said to be the first European metallurgic factory built in the early 1200’s. They also farmed fish in the pond right outside the foundry. Across from the fish pond was a plantane tree dated back to 1780 – now over 35 m tall.
We left Fontenay to drive onto Alise Ste. Reine where Alesia, the battleground where Julius Cesar and the Romans defeated Vercingetoris and the last of the Gauls. On the hilltop site, there is a massive statue of the Gaul leader where the Gauls had held camp for so long. One can imagine Cesar and his troops down below, having built two walls around the camp, waiting until the Gauls had run out of food and supplies before the battle ensued. The actual battle lasted 5 days. Vercingetoris was taken captive. According to stuff we read, this led to the change in French destiny.
Driving along we commented on the quaintness of the French villages, with the appearance of not much happening. It appears life is quite sedate in the small towns. Another thing, in this region, the color of the houses are 99.9% of the time a shade of beige/tan, with color being added by the doors and window shades/shutters.
Denis had stopped by this AM to invite us to his home for a glass of Chablis tonight. We had dinner early this evening, by 6pm. We drove to the little village of Moulins en Tonnerrois about 5 km from Noyers. We found his place easily, thanks to his map and Navi. His home was behind a high rock wall along the road. When we walked through his open gate, we stepped into a wonderful setting for his home, workshop and gardens. It was a true treasure for the painter who designed his yard to have color year-round. From the road one would never guess at the hidden haven beyond the walls. This led us to believe there are many places like this in France.
We enjoyed a couple of glasses of Chablis, met his wife Teresa and chatted. He took us around his yard, home and studio – a true delight for all of us. His works are lovely. Although he may have been hoping we would find another painting we liked, and we did, but as we’re not sure how many walls we have left in our homes we chose to hold off buying. We spent an hour conversing as best we could as we speak more French, than they do English. It was a great opportunity to connect with another couple.
We chose to take a drive through a couple of villages not far from Noyers. There are so many little established settlements within the vast agricultural fields and many of these villages have been around for a long time. The sun was beginning to set adding additional beauty to the drive. There are so many little paved roads to explore here!
Friday, May 11, 2012 – This morning we organized for tomorrow’s departure. By this AM we somewhat amused at the “invasion of the ants”, although M was not all that pleased he had we had battled them every day. Today’s arrival was through the crack under the front door. Managed to kill at least 20 – 30 little guys and spray to entrance area – that’ll do for today’s episode!
Sunny again today, temps reaching in the high 20’s and lovely. We decided to go for a drive through the countryside within 75 km from here. Again it’s enjoyable to explore this area, not very populated with many tiny villages some, only a dozen buildings. A great way to finish off our last afternoon in the area.
When we returned to Noyers, we went to a local bar to use their Wifi, catch up on emails and of course have a beer on the patio within medieval Noyers. It was very warm, and enjoyable. The spot was busy with various tourists stopping by for a drink.
When we returned to Noyers, we went to a local bar to use their Wifi, catch up on emails and of course have a beer on the patio within medieval Noyers. It was very warm, and enjoyable. The spot was busy with various tourists stopping by for a drink.
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