Anyway, we weren't going far today, just over the hills towards Minerve. It was a very pretty drive with interesting little villages along the way. We innocently wandered into a couple of them and were lucky to ever find our way out alive. All the streets seemed to be built on radiating patterns from the centre of town. You'd get going down one only to be faced with a number of one way streets you couldn't enter and the one two-way street you COULD enter was so narrow that you had to suck in the car's sideview mirrors to get through. Always an adventure!
Our ultimate destination was the Plus Beaux Village of Minerve. It has a pretty startling setting, down in the gorge of the Brian River. If you look one way down the gorge, there is nothing but - well - gorge.
Turn around and there is Minerve.
This is yet another Cathar settlement - here the residents ended up burned at the stake. Nice! They have a really impressive stone sculpture to commemorate that moment in 1210, called the Dove of Light.
It's always a pleasure to walk through these Villages, with a new photo op at each corner - the remnants of the castle
a Templar's Doorway
or a view of the natural bridges that the river has cut through the stone.
We had lunch here - moules frites for Dawn and veal liver for me - at the La Terrace Restaurant with a lookout over the viaduct. The food was nothing spectacular, but it was a perfect day for a terrace lunch, for a change.
Our interesting - acronym for crazy winding and narrow - drive back to St. Chinian took us by the Moulin du Rocher above town and from there, we had a nice overview of St. Chinian in the valley.
Back at Aurelie, it was time to continue our serious assessment and evaluation of St. Chinian wines. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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