Too many hours in the car

Before we went to dinner at La Farigoule in Ste, Cecile les Vignes last night, we did some wine tasting at a couple Cairanne locations. We started off with the Cave Camille Cayran in Cairanne, which is still the coop of Cairanne and had a fellow called Mathieu who spoke English and took us through a delightful tasting of their wines. Due to his English help we had a new appreciation for the Coop wines.

Following that we went out to Domaine Rocher to taste their Cairanne wines and discovered that their wine making days were over due to an ill partner. Sadly, we tasted and loved their wines and then bought a case of their Monsieur Paul Cairanne which is outstanding. It was great to sit with the proprietor and sip their wine in the waning evening sun and we felt sad about the winery's demise.
As we set out for dinner, the power in the entire village went out. Oops! Thanks goodness we were going out. When we were at the coop, they said there'd had a short-circuit and they'd lost power in the working end of their winery, just as all of the farmers were lined up to deliver their product.

So, we headed out to Ste. Cecile les Vignes to les Farigoules for dinner and had a fabulous experience.
So... today we went on the long car trip. Didn't really intend that, but that was the nature of the destinations today.
We headed out to the Aven D'Ornac, a Grand Site de France in the Ardeche - apparently the premier cave of all of France. We'd been here before, but with our new tourists, we were looking forward to their reactions.


We fortunately made the 10:00 visit and headed down below. Jessie was initially less than impressed with this visit due to its subterranean nature. As we all made our way to the bottom of the cavern, however, all members of the group were loving the amazing sights of stalagmites and stalactites. Of course, our visit only covered 10% of the caves they've discovered in this area.
Following this, we took the precipitous drive through the Ardeche and back to safe ground. Although I've done this drive before, there were a few white knucklers sitting in the background.


From here, we took the drive south to Pont du Gard and walked the site across the bridge with many amazed visitors. The scope of this site can be overwhelming and I'm pretty sure it was.


We headed back towards the ranch and decided on the rapid route via the A-9 north to Orange and then the A-7 south to our regular turnoff at Orange Sud and this was GOOD.
From here it was up to Seguret and the English tour of the Mourchon Domaine. Last time we were here the skies opened up and we never really got the vineyard tour. But today the weather was spectacular and we had a great tutorial in the vineyard from Hugo, who is both the son-in-law of the owner and the principle wine maker of Mourchon.

He took us through the whole process from vine to bottle and then we tasted the product. It was as good as last time.
From here it was back to Cairanne for a homespun dinner a la Dawn.