King of Cheese

Thursday’s journey was one that I had been looking forward to ever since I realized I was close enough to make the drive from Agel.

According to my research, it was just under 2 hours to get to Roquefort, yes the place of a famous cheese, if I took the autoroute. So off I went.

Of course, since the moas on my GPS were slightly our if date, it didn’t know that A1 came as far south as I was and decided to take me a different route. It was a lovely route, but it was hard to enjoy due to the hairpin turns needed to get me up and over the mountains. The phot below is the view for the top of one of the plateaus that I navigated that day.

So, as I alluded to in my last post, it really felt as I kept adding time to my journey all the way there. Of course since I eventually made it, this trend did stop, or I would still be during there now, but it was frustrating and the driving was quite technical and tiring especially since I was by myself.

Going this back way, I did stumble on a few places I never torn wise would have seen, so that was a perk.

Finally I arrived and just needed to find parking and figure out my plan for the day.

And it turned out , that even just trying to find something like the tourism office was challenging, so my navigation difficulties were not just due to GPS woes. But I did find it, and got a good test of my French. I was following the woman’s advice fairly well until she used a word I just couldn’t figure out. But that gave me a chance to ask, and to learn a new word, reconstitution, which means reconstruction, and here was used to designate that for one of the tours you didn’t get to see a real cave, instead you walked through something set up to look like one.

By this time, it was nearing noon and the tour of the real cave was shutting for lunch, so it made sense to grab lunch as well. So I decided to eat at the site that had this tour.

Since I had been eating a lot the last few days, whole I was hungry, I didn’t want a multiple course meal. But I did want something with Roquefort, so I went for the burger – and was quite pleased. I wish I could get a blue cheese burger like this back home.

By the time I finished, the tours had started back up so I headed off to join the Société tour. And my timing was great as one had just started, so I didn’t have to wait and only missed a little bit of an animated display that did didn’t look like it would have been very good anyway.

During the tour, we learned about the how the different types of penicillin distinguish the cheeses from the different houses and how important both the cool temperature (8-12 C) and the high humidity (95%) are to obtaining the right product.

Thee was a film that explained a lot of the process and we got to see the actual cave with cheese waiting for its day to be revealed.

Of course at the end we got to taste (and buy) the product.

After the tour, I checked out the one where you see the model cave. It was nice that it was free, but the real cave was much better, just as the woman at the tourist office had said. There were also a couple of other places to taste the cheese from different houses, but not all of them were open, and in the end I liked what I tasted at the firs place the best.

I did wander around the town a bit as well, thought it is pretty small so that didn’t take much time.

If I’d had more time, ad if I hadn’t been by myself, it would have been nice to take some of the trails that lead out from this little village into top he surrounding countryside, as the write ups for them sounded quite nice.

But, it was time to make friends again with the GPS and head back to Agel. But only after I ignored the initial directions and followed the signs to the autoroute. Even this was pretty technical at times as you had to slow down to 50 kph during he descent from the mountains. And once I exited, I had a challenge once again finding the best route to Agel. At least this time I avoided the roads that seemed like sidewalks and made it back in time for a lovely catered dinner of fois gras torchon the best fois gras I have ever had (it was prepared from the raw products by the chef) as well as blanquette de veau.