Our Trip To France – Part 2: Our First Day On French Soil
Our travel day was a bit of a mess. But once my wife and I arrived at the village that we were staying at, we had a very typical French meal and got some sleep. Now we’re staying in a town called Gilhoc Sur Ormeze which is in the Ardèche department in southern France. The closest city is Valance which is in the Drôme department, and both are located in the Rhone Alps. To get to Gilhoc Sur Ormeze, you have to drive on some windy, narrow roads that take you deeper and deeper into the Rhone Alps. And driving those roads will make you feel like a rally driver because of how narrow they are. They will also stress you out because of how narrow they are. If I could give you one tip, don’t overestimate your own driving ability on roads like these. Drive sensibly and you’ll get to your destination safe and sound. And if you have cars behind you who want to go by you, look for a safe place to pull over and let them by.
The scenery is stunning, and I will show you some pictures of that scenery in a later update. But driving from Lyon led us to this place:
This French manor house dates back to the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, which puts it around the late 1700’s and has been owned by the same family that entire time. I was not able to take pictures of the interior which is equally as stunning out of respect that there is a family that lives here full time. And that family who invited us over and gave us this house on the property to stay in while we were in France:
We were staying in the property on the right side with the garage. It has two floors and the interior was rebuilt extensively by the owner’s late husband. On the left is a mill.
This is the mill wheel that no longer works as the supply of water that turned it was cut off about 90 years ago.
Here’s a couple of shots of the interior:
It was very nice place to stay in and we were lucky to have such a nice place to stay in France. A couple of other notes about the property.
It has a pond on it and inside the pond are these fellows:
Speaking of nature, when you get up in the morning, you can hear birds, frogs, roosters, and even dogs barking in the morning. It’s a nice soundtrack to get up to in the morning. Also because there’s no artificial lighting, you can see the stars easily and it gets pretty dark. Another nice thing about the property was this:
The box on the right with the three lights is a fibre modem/WiFi access point from Orange Telecom France. My wife and I were surprised that fibre optic Internet was available in a location that literally had no cell service as evidenced in this picture:
If you look at the top right, my iPhone 14 Pro presented me with the SOS via Satellite functionality. I had never seen that before, and given the nature of the roads in the area, that’s a handy feature to have if you crash.
Now back to the fact that this place in the middle of nowhere in France has fibre optic Internet where there are areas in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area that don’t have fibre optic Internet. I noted that Orange was laying a lot of fibre optic cable everywhere we drive. Seeing as the area is mountainous as well has rural, that was impressive. So were these speeds which I got off of my laptop via WiFi:
These are pretty good speeds and are faster than some people get in Canada with a pretty great ping time. That allowed my wife and I to set up our respective MacBook Pros with ease once we got the WiFi password.
As for our first day on French soil, we did some grocery shopping with the help of our host who was able to bridge the divide between two English speaking people in a French speaking country. Seeing as the place we were staying in had its own kitchen, my wife and I decided to fend for ourselves. We then went into Valance and walked around. Since it was Monday, a lot of things were closed. But I did manage to take a couple of photos to give you an idea of what we saw:
After doing some more shopping for clothes, and food, we then went to a chocolate factory called Valrhona which was located in Tain l’Hermitage which is just outside of Valance. My wife went to town and bought over 100 Euros of chocolate. I’m not a chocolate person so she’s free to do her. But if you’re in the area, they do give tours of the factory for the price of 9 Euros per person before noon and 10.50 Euros after that.
Tomorrow we have a French market that we need to leave early in the morning to get to. That’s all we know so that will be interesting. Stay tuned to find out how that pans out.
This entry was posted on July 26, 2023 at 9:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Our Trip To France – Part 2: Our First Day On French Soil
Our travel day was a bit of a mess. But once my wife and I arrived at the village that we were staying at, we had a very typical French meal and got some sleep. Now we’re staying in a town called Gilhoc Sur Ormeze which is in the Ardèche department in southern France. The closest city is Valance which is in the Drôme department, and both are located in the Rhone Alps. To get to Gilhoc Sur Ormeze, you have to drive on some windy, narrow roads that take you deeper and deeper into the Rhone Alps. And driving those roads will make you feel like a rally driver because of how narrow they are. They will also stress you out because of how narrow they are. If I could give you one tip, don’t overestimate your own driving ability on roads like these. Drive sensibly and you’ll get to your destination safe and sound. And if you have cars behind you who want to go by you, look for a safe place to pull over and let them by.
The scenery is stunning, and I will show you some pictures of that scenery in a later update. But driving from Lyon led us to this place:
This French manor house dates back to the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, which puts it around the late 1700’s and has been owned by the same family that entire time. I was not able to take pictures of the interior which is equally as stunning out of respect that there is a family that lives here full time. And that family who invited us over and gave us this house on the property to stay in while we were in France:
We were staying in the property on the right side with the garage. It has two floors and the interior was rebuilt extensively by the owner’s late husband. On the left is a mill.
This is the mill wheel that no longer works as the supply of water that turned it was cut off about 90 years ago.
Here’s a couple of shots of the interior:
It was very nice place to stay in and we were lucky to have such a nice place to stay in France. A couple of other notes about the property.
It has a pond on it and inside the pond are these fellows:
Speaking of nature, when you get up in the morning, you can hear birds, frogs, roosters, and even dogs barking in the morning. It’s a nice soundtrack to get up to in the morning. Also because there’s no artificial lighting, you can see the stars easily and it gets pretty dark. Another nice thing about the property was this:
The box on the right with the three lights is a fibre modem/WiFi access point from Orange Telecom France. My wife and I were surprised that fibre optic Internet was available in a location that literally had no cell service as evidenced in this picture:
If you look at the top right, my iPhone 14 Pro presented me with the SOS via Satellite functionality. I had never seen that before, and given the nature of the roads in the area, that’s a handy feature to have if you crash.
Now back to the fact that this place in the middle of nowhere in France has fibre optic Internet where there are areas in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area that don’t have fibre optic Internet. I noted that Orange was laying a lot of fibre optic cable everywhere we drive. Seeing as the area is mountainous as well has rural, that was impressive. So were these speeds which I got off of my laptop via WiFi:
These are pretty good speeds and are faster than some people get in Canada with a pretty great ping time. That allowed my wife and I to set up our respective MacBook Pros with ease once we got the WiFi password.
As for our first day on French soil, we did some grocery shopping with the help of our host who was able to bridge the divide between two English speaking people in a French speaking country. Seeing as the place we were staying in had its own kitchen, my wife and I decided to fend for ourselves. We then went into Valance and walked around. Since it was Monday, a lot of things were closed. But I did manage to take a couple of photos to give you an idea of what we saw:
After doing some more shopping for clothes, and food, we then went to a chocolate factory called Valrhona which was located in Tain l’Hermitage which is just outside of Valance. My wife went to town and bought over 100 Euros of chocolate. I’m not a chocolate person so she’s free to do her. But if you’re in the area, they do give tours of the factory for the price of 9 Euros per person before noon and 10.50 Euros after that.
Tomorrow we have a French market that we need to leave early in the morning to get to. That’s all we know so that will be interesting. Stay tuned to find out how that pans out.
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This entry was posted on July 26, 2023 at 9:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.