St Rémy to La Rochelle

What a feast for our last night in St Rémy – crêpes galore!! – savoury ones with ham, walnuts, spinach, courgettes, tomatoes, salami, cheese or the fromage chèvre (goat’s cheese) that many have taken a liking to, and sweet ones with chocolate, almonds, bananas, whipped cream, honey, ice cream or lemon, all washed down with a rich and milky ‘chocolat chaud’. Sitting outside the restaurant in a typically leafy and quaint St Rémy square was fun until the cool breeze drove us ‘home’ to pack.

It was hard to leave this pretty little town and the Hôtel du Soleil with its wisteria-covered patio, cooing doves and views of orange-tiled rooftops stretching up to the lumpy grey Alpilles mountains which van Gogh was so fond of painting.

Sunday was a loooooong day – 8am pick up from the hotel followed by three train trips totalling 7 hours. With stops in between, the journey took all day. Getting 17 people and their increasingly bulging cases on and off the trains three times was a bit of a challenge but our ‘chain gang’ approach proved quite successful in the end.

On the trains, Ollie’s iPad provided some popular entertainment – chess, Monopoly etc, but the closer we got to La Rochelle, the more the nerves set in, and Madame was much in demand with questions aimed at surviving the first night with a French family.

                                                             

We needn’t have worried though – the welcome was SO warm – our hosts had made themselves very obvious at the train station and soon everyone was off with their families for their first taste of total immersion.