Post It from Camping Yelloh Village, Saint-Emilion, Gironde, Aquitaine, France. Friday 20th June, 20

Our drive north took us through pleasant agricultural landscapes to Langdon on the River Garonne before crossing the River Dordogne closer to our destination. Around the latter we could see the landscape change to fields of grape vines for which this area of France is famous for.

We had to go via Liborne to reach Saint-Emilion, according to the campsite instructions, and we later saw that this medieval town had a 2m width restriction when entering it from the south. We found the campsite with ease and from first appearances we could see it was going to be lovely. It was set in an area of trees, around a small lake and amongst the fields of grape vines everywhere you looked.

The site staff we extremely welcoming and spoke excellent English so registering and obtaining a pitch was very easy. There are special pitches for motorhomes with a hard standing on this otherwise grass site and we were allocated one adjacent the restaurant. This was a good position really, at the end of a lane so no passing traffic and once I had erected the windbreak along the low restaurant fencing where there was no conifer hedging we were pretty much as private as you could have been. It also meant I had Wi-Fi access from the pitch and we were fairly close to all the amenities, including the two heated swimming pools with spars.

Closer examination of the site showed it to be absolutely excellent, spotlessly clean, lots of things for families with children and the staff, without exception in every department, were there to help and please. This was totally opposite to our other experiences on French campsites which we generally have found to be lacking.

Our first fully day here included a camp site organised free visit to the Chateau Trimoulet for a guided visit and wine tasting, it was only a few hundred meters away and could be seen from the campsite gates. We drink wine but have no real knowledge or understanding of how it is produced or what makes a better one than the next but on this visit we learned lots. This Chateau is one of the larger ones with 80 hectares and produces 80,000 bottles of Saint-Emilion Gran Cruz wines a year which are exported world-wide. It has been in the Jean family for nine generations and the latest proprietor is the first female to hold that position. We were given a top notch insight into how the vines are grown and taken from the fields through the vats and into the barrels before bottling. We sampled a bottle of the award winning Chateau Trimoulet 2010 at 21 Euros a bottle and also Jean de Trimoulet 2011 at 13.50 Euros a bottle and we could tell the difference, but both were excellent.

I asked the owner’s husband if Sharon’s method of telling a good wine from one not so well on the supermarket shelves by feeling the dimple in the bottom of the bottle, the bigger it is generally the better the wine. He told me that is probably true as the deeper the dimple the more expensive the bottle is and able to hold more sediment which is needed for the more expensive wines that can be kept for a number of years before being drunk. All these wines here had big dimples!

We were able to cycle here quite a lot but we would have benefitted from a proper ordnance survey map and a GPS fixing method as there were many small roads with no sign posts and when there were signs it was to one of the 1000 wine Chateau’s of the area, which was not much help to us. The campsite provided sketch maps for routes, provided by the tourist board, but these were not much better and the staff said ‘Everyone gets lost’ and told us to look out for the Chateau St George which is high up and close to the campsite and a good landmark. As anticipated we too got lost but found our way back using the good advice we had been given.

We ventured into Saint-Emilion twice during our stay, once on market day to find a disappointing three stalls present and the only fruit and vegetable stall had no carrots at all. Still the small town does have one small supermarket with a good range of products. As I have commented upon in past stories I still cannot get over the price differential between France and Spain, here a kilo of cherries were 9.50€ where in Aranjuez the week before we bought some for a mere 3.50€ and in Caceres they were only 3.00€ from street traders. As far as shops went there were very few except for wine caves, which one seller told us numbered 50 in the town. There were lots of restaurants but I think for quality and service you could not beat the one on the camp site.

Here is a little bit of history I learned during our stay. Saint-Emilion’s first inhabitants were from 15,000 years ago in the Paleolithic age then the Romans introduced the vines in 27BC and created the province of Aquitaine. The first monastery came in the 7^th Century and finally a Monk called Emilion arrived from Brittany in the 8^th Century and created a hermitage in a cave and the name was born. He was said to have performed many miracles and a religious town developed and by the 12^th Century it had 10,000 residents, churches, monasteries, ramparts and was the second City of the province after Bordeaux. It only seems so small really to have been so important and you can walk around all of its 12 listed monuments easily in a day.

Not only is its fame related to the high quality wines it produces but it was the last place the leaders of the French Revolution ‘Girondists,’ fled to in 1793-1794 and the Ursulines Nuns who came in the 17^th Century baked macaroons which the town also became famous for. They are very good too! No evidence of the Camino Santiago passing through here for a change but we did find a Templar tomb stone in the ruins of the first Dominican monastery.

We spent a full week here because the weather was excellent, still reaching up to 36ºC but it did not feel as dry a heat as Spain so was more pleasurable. We had chosen to visit here after reading a recommendation on the Club forum, I think from ‘oldagetraveller,’ so a big thank you to him as we were not disappointed at all and will probably return one day. The staff say all their sites are of a similar standard so we shall look out for them in the future and this one has certainly altered our perception of campsites in France.

Smokee was not overly happy here though, something which we have not noticed before, we knew he loves to be in the sun and prefers Bessie to home as there are more windows in one room for the sun to come through. He generally lazes in the sun until he has had enough and then moves into the shade and goes back when he wants more. Here the van was almost entirely in the shade all the time and he was clearly missing the ability to get into the sun when he wanted to, instead he kept pestering us throughout the day to come and sit outside on our knee, well mine mainly. We just did not realise how important it was to him. Today he was out there for breakfast with us as we had a treat of croissants with strawberry jam for a change.

The weather further north is definitely cooler according to the forecasts but hopefully we may miss the rain so shall look at making good use of our few remaining days and doing more sightseeing along our way to Calais when we leave tomorrow.

Regards, Roy